[SOLVED] Password Compression in Mint

[Danko8321]

Hello, forum fellas, excuse my newbieness if it annoys you, but I have a question about compression in Mint: I know Mint (as well as many other Linux systems) has a great compression Tool, what I don't know is why it doesn't ask for a password twice before creating password protected archives. I know that It's probably more of me being used to Windows interface, but that double-password-checking feature has saved my PC environment from getting completely lost a lot more than just a couple times. I would love to have the same thing at Mint, because it makes me feel a lot safer (you know, the probabilities of making the same mistake twice are so low that I never even bother to worry about it). Anyway, thats pretty much all, Double-checking before password protecting in Mint/Linux.

PS: I don't mind if I have to compress trough a command-line, but I would appreciate if it could also be done in graphical mode; maybe something to tell the Development crew to add to Mint 12.

[xenopeek]

IIRC, zip file passwords can be cracked relatively easily. I'm using GPG with strong encryption, in a backup script that I wrote. The command line for just zipping and encrypting is as follows. This asks you to give your password twice.

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zip -9 -r - TARGETS | gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo AES256 --output archive.zip.gpg

Where you replace TARGETS with the space separated list of files and folders. For example, if you want to backup with encryption just your Documents and Downloads folder, you would open a terminal and run:

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zip -9 -r - Documents Downloads | gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo AES256 --output archive.zip.gpg

At any time when you want to decrypt a file, you just run:

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gpg archive.zip.gpg

It will ask for your password, and create the original zip file which you can then unzip with a tool of your choice. GPG is also available on Windows and OSX, so you won't be locked in to using Linux (though you have to download the tool then).

[Danko8321]

Awesome Tool, but is doesn't seem to be what I was looking for; the compression algorithm is very capable, and seems more than just fairly safe, the thing is that it's syntax is very complex, and (even though I love the fact that it's harder to violate) for the kind of tasks I'm currently doing it seems like a bit to much of a trouble. I'll keep it very closely in mind, since it seems to be very good, but this is an Enterprise-Level compression tool, and right now I'm just at a KinderGarden-Level newbie , so It wouldn't be necessary. If you find something with a little lower complexity level (since I run Backups very often and it isn't sensitive data, I don't want to run such a large script), I'd be happy to hear it, if not, thanks for this one, it's really cool and it's definitively going to be useful in the future.

[xenopeek]

Okay It seems very strange to me that the built-in archiver online asks for password once, that is sure to have caused problems for more people.

From the command line, zip with encryption does ask you to verify your password:

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zip -e -9 -r ARCHIVE TARGETS

Where you replace ARCHIVE with how you want your zipfile to be called, and TARGETS again by the space separated list of files and folders. The -e is for encrypting it, -9 for best compression and -r for including subfolders.

[Danko8321]

Yes, it is very troublesome, since if you make one tiny mistake on the process of writing the password you wont realise it, and then, if you want to decompress it, you'll have to try every possible keystroke combination that could have gone wrong (or simply use a brute force-method script, which is not nearly less annoying). Ok, this is a possible solution, the syntax is easy and I will remember (and use) it a lot of times, but, I don't know why its popping this error message and doesn't let me compress the file:

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maquiavelo@Maquiavelo ~ $ zip -e -9 -r XmodMap Xmodmap
Enter password: 
Verify password: 
	zip warning: name not matched: Xmodmap

zip error: Nothing to do! (try: zip -e -9 -r XmodMap . -i Xmodmap)

I already checked and the structure of the my prompt is correct (even tried to change a few things, like specifying the whole path to the directory), so I don't know what to try now. Any clues?

[xenopeek]

Linux is case sensitive, the file Xmodmap can not be found. Try XmodMap, or check what the actually spelling is of the file.

[Danko8321]

It indeed worked, and you were right, it was about the Casing of the letters; thanks, marked as solved.