Encryption software is an important consideration when it comes to protecting your files and folders. Hack attempts and privacy intrusions mean that it’s sensible to ensure that complete strangers don’t gain access to your most personal details stored on your computer.
There are a number of different approaches you can take to protect your valuable data. For example, disk encryption uses disk encryption software to encrypt the entire hard disk. The onus is therefore not on the user to determine what data should be encrypted, or to remember to manually encrypt files. By encrypting the entire disk, temporary files, which may reveal important confidential data, are also protected. Security is enhanced further when disk encryption is combined with filesystem-level encryption.
age doesn’t offer disk encryption. Instead it’s designed to be a simple, modern and secure command-line file encryption tool. File encryption helps protect your data by encrypting it. Only someone with the right encryption key (such as a passphrase) can decrypt it.
Installation
You may find there’s a convenient package for age for you distro. Installation on Ubuntu/Debian is trivial. Simply issue the command:
$ sudo apt install age
There’s also packages available for Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Void, as well as OpenBSD and FreeBSD. And there are pre-built binaries available for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows.
As age is open source software, there’s the full source code available if you want to traverse the manual approach.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary