I recently encrypted a NoteCase document, which is very a simple way keep some of the HDDs contents really private. I had to review it's Help file to be certain I didn't make any mistakes. In my Lucid it is found in /usr/share/doc/notecase/help.ncd, activated from he Help menu choice. In HOWTOs there is a section on Creating encrypted documents, with a link to Encryption security in the FAQ:
There are 2 more links, one dead, and one that require installation of a program, so I skipped them.How secure is the encrypted file format?
NoteCase uses the Blowfish algorithm for its encrypted format. This algorithm is considered to be pretty strong and is very popular and widely used, especially since it's patent-free. For really paranoid people (or the ones that require a really high level of security) there is one more issue to consider; program memory can be swapped from memory to hard disk (a swap partition or swap file) while the program is running. In that way the contents of a protected document might end up being written to swap in unencrypted form.
There are two standard ways to ensure a high level of the safety of your information:
- by using an encrypted swap partition (on Linux)
- by wiping all the data in your swap partition, for example on each shutdown
Read more at:
http://www.iusmentis.com/security/filewiping/wipeswap/
The advice to read more is a good one. In the text in the link, there is a warning that the swap file cannot be wiped while the computer is working, which is aimed at those of you still using Windoze. That situation is different when using our Puppys, as we have a swap partition, not a swap file. There are instructions for wiping the Linux swap partition at the bottom of the page. The info on which partition is swap, is found in /proc/swaps, not in /etc/fstab as the text says. You may want to run the command man swapon first also, it's always useful to know some of the background info.