How do I make a file require a password to open?
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Files are just data; nothing about any arbitrary file can make it require
a password.
If you have an application that creates files then you can often use that
application to encrypt a file with a password so while you can open it
with anything without a password you can only really get valuable data out
if you know the password to allow the decryption of the data. Documents
created in OpenOffice, for example, follow this idea.
You can encrypt any arbitrary file with something like PGP/GPG if you’d
like and then nothing will be able to open it until you either decrypt it
(before opening it) or unless the application used to open it supports
decryption the same way you encrypted it and you also have the
password/passphrase/key used for the encryption.
Good luck.
On 04/22/2010 08:16 AM, openalex wrote:
>
> How do I make a file require a password to open?
>
>
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I will suggest that you take a look at cryptkeeper and encfs. encfs is “encrypted file system”, works on the command line. Cryptkeeper provides a gui.
Thank you for your ideas. I have used GPG keys in the past for my local files, but I got tired of keeping up with my own key pairs.
I will look into cryptkeeper and some similar alternatives.
Many thanks.
I like cryptkeeper on Linux only. I’m having to share my encrypted files between OS boxes now, tho - and Truecrypt seems to be the cross-platform FOSS answer to that. So far I’m impressed with its ease-of-use.