Hi, I was planning to encrypt my files with GPG for safety before uploading them to the cloud. However, from what I understand GPG doesn’t pad files/do much to prevent file fingerprinting. I was looking around for a way to reliably pad files and encrypt metadata for them but couldn’t find anything. Haven’t found any recommendations on the privacyguides website either. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    5·
    5 months ago

    Yes GPG should add appropriate padding (random initialization vector) to not reveal whether two ciphertexts have the same plaintext. It makes no real attempt to conceal that the two plaintexts have the same length. If you want that, best bet is to make all ciphertexts the same length, by padding plaintexts out to 1MB or whatever, and turning off compression. Actually you might first check the manual to see if there is already an option for that. There are a lot, and I no longer keep track.

    Cryptographer’s saying (Silvio Micali, I think): “A good disguise does not reveal the person’s height”. So you are on the right track.

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      5 months ago

      I also have media and other binary blobs which I’d like to archive in an encrypted fashion, will GPG suffice? ChatGPT mentioned OpenSSL for this but I’m not sure where that’s taking me.

      • solrize@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        Openssl really isn’t the right thing for that. GPG is fine for individual files if you don’t mind leaking the approximate length. You may be better off with borg backup depending on your exact use case.