I was looking for a quick and easy way to encrypt a file, mostly for very simple use cases - eg. your mom needs the password to something and you have to email it to her, or you want to send yourself a quick email with a note containing some financial information, that sort of thing.

I particularly wanted something with a GUI rather than a command line, and bonus points for something you could right-click in a file manager and choose to encrypt from the pop-up menu.

Happily, I found AES Crypt.

Basically you just download the program, untar the file, make sure it has executable perms, and double-click it. It will install itself very quickly. You can also use the terminal to install by command line if you like.

Then when you have any file you wish to encrypt, just right click the file in Thunar or whatever and use the "open with" dialog to choose "aescrypt-gui" as the "open with" program.

Make sure to choose aescrypt-gui and not plain aescrypt. Otherwise you won't see the password popup.

It will ask you for a password, you just enter the password, and an encrypted file is created.

To decrypt the file, right click the encrypted file and open with aescrypt-gui again. It will again ask for the password, and when you provide the password it will spit out a decrypted version of the file.

The encrypted file is always created with a file extension of .aes so you can easily associate it with aescrypt-gui for future use in file managers.

This is the fastest, easiest GUI solution I've found to date, so it's my current favorite method :)


tags: encryption, AES Crypt