Excellent Utilities: horcrux – file splitter with encryption and redundancy

This series highlights best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.

horcrux is an open source tool that’s designed to split files and keep them secure with encryption. This encryption doesn’t require remembering a passphrase or retaining a private key. Instead, the utility uses the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme to break an encryption key into parts that can be recombined to create the original key, but only requiring a certain threshold to do so.

The tool therefore includes redundancy so that you can resurrect the original file without needing access to all of the split files.

There isn’t an Ubuntu package available for the utility. Instead go to the project’s GitHub directory and download the appropriate tarball for your system. We selected the file horcrux_0.2_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz.

Extract the file with the command:

$ tar zxvf horcrux_0.2_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz.

Then copy the horcrux file to a directory in your PATH such as /usr/local/bin

$ sudo cp horvrux /usr/local/bin

The horcrux tool runs from the command-line but there aren’t a great slue of commands to learn. In fact there’s just two command, split and bind.

Let’s suppose you have an file called inventory.txt and want to split into 5 parts but require only 3 of these parts to resurrect the file. We issue the horcrux’s split command:

$ horcrux -t 3 -n 5 split inventory.txt

This command generates output:

Let’s examine the size of these generated files.

You’ll notice the program copies the encrypted file into each horcrux. This will use a lot of storage with a large file that’s split into many pieces. There are a number of different ways the project could seek to reduce the size of each generated file. However, as there doesn’t seem to be active development currently this might be something a budding Go developer may wish to take forward.

Summary

horcrux is a very useful tool if you want to keep important files secure with encryption and have multiple locations to store the generated files. The utility is simple, and quick to learn with only 2 commands.

Website: github.com/jesseduffield/horcrux
Support:
Developer: Jesse Duffield
License: MIT License

horcrux is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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