sweepslate at gmail
Oct 17, 2011, 4:51 AM
Post #3 of 8
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Re: use key, not passphrase, in symmetric encryption
[In reply to]
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The end goal is to encrypt a volume of around 100GB of personal files
that I'll be carrying arround with me in a portable drive.
It's around 14000 files, so I can't possibly encrypt them one-by-one
interactively! Doing a tarball is going to be time-consuming, space
consuming [1], and cumbersome. Also the process can't be stoped (and
it's going to be a big process), and the only thing I'm gaining is
hidding the original filenames, which I do not care in this scenario. So
I'd like to avoid the tarball. If possible.
So I concluced that I need a non-interactive, 'scriptable' if you'd
like, way to perform the action.
I wanted to use symmetric so as not to add unnecessary complexity to the
solution. I'm only encrypting to myself.
I wanted to use something larger than a passphrase so I wondered if I
can use a key. But on a second thought, I could use a SHA512SUM as a
passphrase, which is 128 bytes in length. That makes it 1024 bits;
correct? It's like a small key. I could use 4 of them combined for the
strength of a key of 4096 bits.
If it's not possible to use a key or a 128-512 bytes passphrase, I could
go for the classic way of public-private key. But I want to keep public
key encryption as a last resort (I have reasons additional to complexity).
The key point is doing the encryption of 14000 files in a
non-interactive way.
[1] While encrypting single files can be done progressively, in the same
drive, without requiring exta space.
On 10/17/2011 4:37 AM, Doug Barton wrote:
> On 10/16/2011 14:37, sweepslate wrote:
>> I want to encrypt a file symmetrically but use a key instead of a
>> passphrase.
>
> It's sort of hard to understand what you're trying to accomplish, can
> you give us more details?
>
>
> Doug
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