Hi,
I am not so sure, where to post this, but as it is not related to any help, just ideas so i will post it in this forum.
Mods: If this is not the best place, please move it to appropriate place which it suits. Tqs.
I have a file with some sensitive data inside, what i can do with it is to keep the user root to make it more secure. And after that encrypt the file. Delete the original and keep the encrypted one. If need some updating later, decrypt it and encrypt it again after update.
So my question is, Is this the best way to make secure a sensitive file?
Is there any other simple way around to do this type of job?
If it’s just one file you could probably just compress it with a good password, that would be very easy (not sure which compression tool can use passwords though).
A harder way would be to create an encrypted file, mount it as an encrypted partition, copy the file into it, then unmount it. It’s more complicated but can be done with the cryptsetup command (see man cryptsetup).
I hope that’s what you meant, sorry if I misunderstood :).
In general, I would not recommend TrueCrypt (RealCrypt) for Linux-only environments, it makes only sense, if there is a need to use the same encrypted data on Linux/*NIX and Mac/Win, otherwise encryption software already provided by the distribution is clearly the better solution.
I don’t know how sensitive your data is. And against whom you want to protect the file. When you delete the original it is still on your hard disk and quite easy to recover (at least parts of it). This is provided someone has physical access to your computer.
You can copy the file onto a USB stick (encrypted if you like) and lock that stick away. Then use some disk eraser program to delete it on the hard disk (by multiple overwrites). Beware: when you have edited the file there may already be multiple copies of it, all “deleted” but still available.