HACKER Q&A
📣 grungegun

Small, open source, C based, file encryption?


I'm using cryptomator for file encryption right now. I'd like to use a small, portable, C-based (for familiarity and guaranteed future support), open source, command-line/terminal program to encrypt txt files so I can read it and potentially make fixes if it ever stops being supported. What should I use?

  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
Sortof small, portable in compilation sense, one could use GPG or OpenSSL or one of the variants. [1] OpenSSL and GPG should be around for some time. You can also keep the source code [2] around of any version in the event that they break backwards compatibility with the method you used to encrypt your files such as deprecating a protocol or individual cipher.

  ls -alh bin/openssl lib/libssl.so.1.1 lib/libcrypto.so.1.1
  -r-xr-xr-t 1 root root 616K Jul 26 17:39 bin/openssl
  -r-xr-xr-t 1 root root 2.4M Jul 26 17:38 lib/libcrypto.so.1.1
  -r-xr-xr-t 1 root root 552K Jul 26 17:38 lib/libssl.so.1.1
[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16056135/how-to-use-open...

[2] - https://ftp.openssl.org/snapshot/ or rsync://ftp.openssl.org::openssl-ftp/snapshot/