Tomb: A file encryption tool to protect your files

The developers of SparkyLinux (a Debian derivative) have added the Tomb package

Tomb is a free and open source file encryption toolor to protect your secret files on GNU / Linux operating systems.

Allows users to create encrypted storage (a folder) on the file system and save important data on it.

Encrypted storage can be opened and closed using its associated key files, which are also protected by a password which is chosen by the user.

For security reasons, you can save the key files on a separate medium, for example a USB drive or a CD / DVD.

Encrypted folders are called "tombs". Any number of tombs can be created on your hard drive as long as you have enough free space.

A tomb can only be opened if it has the file containing the keys and password. It also has advanced features, such as steganography, which allows you to hide key files within another file.

Although Tomb is a CLI tool, it also has a GUI container called gtomb, which makes using Tomb much easier for beginners.

How to install Tomb on Linux?

The developers of SparkyLinux (a Debian derivative) have added the Tomb package in their official repositories. So you can install it by adding the main SparkyLinux repositories on your DEB-based system.

To add the SparkyLinux repositories on Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derived systems, we must edit the following file with:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sparky-repo.list

And add the following lines:

deb https://sparkylinux.org/repo stable main

deb-src https://sparkylinux.org/repo stable main

deb https://sparkylinux.org/repo testing main

deb-src https://sparkylinux.org/repo testing main

Now they just give Ctrl + O to save and Ctrl + X to exit.

Then they must type

wget -O - https://sparkylinux.org/repo/sparkylinux.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tomb gtomb

For Those who are Arch Linux users and systems derived from it such as Manjaro, Antergos and others, we must install the application from the AUR repositories with the following command:

yay -S tomb gtomb

For other Linux distributions will need to download and compile the application source code on their systems.

So they must open a terminal and type:

wget https://files.dyne.org/tomb/Tomb-2.5.tar.gz

Then they should unpack the newly downloaded file with:

tar xvfz Tomb-2.5.tar.gz

Then go into your directory and run 'make install' as root, this will install Tomb in / usr / local.

cd Tomb-2.5

sudo make install

After installation you can check that it was installed correctly by typing any of the following commands:

tomb -h

man tomb  

Basic use

Once the application is installed, They can proceed to create a tomb, for example, we are going to create a space of 10 MB and with the name of "nombreespacio" here you give it the name you want:

tomb dig -s 10 nombredelespacio.tomb      

Done this now we are going to sign a key along with your password that you will be asked to create and above all not to forget.

tomb forge -k nombredelespacio.tomb.key   

And ready now if we want to open the file we will be asked for the key and the password:

tomb lock  -k nombredelespacio.tomb.key secrets.tomb

When this is done, the tomb can be opened with:

tomb open -k nombredelespacio.tomb.key secrets.tomb

When they have carried out this process, they will be able to see in their file manager that a new space was created (as if it were a new hard disk or a USB). Here they can save the information they want according to the space they assigned.

The key can also be hidden in an image, for later use.

tomb bury -k nombredelespacio.tomb.key imagen.jpg

tomb open -k imagen.jpg secrets.tomb

Once the process you want is done, you can proceed to close the space created with the command:

sudo tomb close

In this way your files or information stored in this space will be safe, since you will need the key and the password to be able to see its content.

It is important to mention that if you lose the password or forget the password, you will not be able to recover your information.

In the case of the gtomb graphical interface, you simply have to follow the steps indicated by this one, since its interface is quite intuitive.


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