Enchive : encrypted personal archives

Enchive is a tool encrypts files to yourself for long-term archival. It's intended as a focused, simple alternative to more complex solutions such as GnuPG. This program has no external dependencies and is very easy to build for local use.

Files are secured with uses ChaCha20, Curve25519, and SHA-224.

Usage

There are only three commands to worry about: keygen, archive, and extract. The very first thing to do is generate a master keypair using keygen.

$ enchive keygen

By default, this will create two files in your home directory: .enchive.pub (public key) and .enchive.sec (secret key). Distribute .enchive.pub to any machines where you plan to archive files. It's sufficient to encrypt files, but not to decrypt them.

To archive a file for storage:

$ enchive archive file.tar.gz

This will encrypt file.tar.gz as file.tar.gz.enchive (leaving the original in place). You can safely archive this wherever.

To extract the file later on a machine with .encrypt.sec:

$ enchive extract file.tar.gz.enchive

This will reproduce file.tar.gz.

Notes

There's no effort at error recovery. It bails out on the first error.