Encrypt your shared files

The main reason why some people avoid using public shares is the matter of trust. But in most other regards, public shares are more convenient than peer-to-peer communications. Luckily, you can combine the power of both by using EncFS— the encrypted filesystem.

KEncFS is an easy-to-use graphical front-end for the filesystem. Launch it and press the ‘Add’ button, give a name for a new entry, set the mount point (a destination directory) and then in the ‘Encrypted directory’ field select the directory that will show encrypted files. Finally, set the access password and enjoy the on-the-fly encryption. Using this technique, you can tell KEncFS to use ~/Public or ~/Dropbox, or whatever the path to your shared files is, as the ‘Encrypted directory’. As a consequence, if your shared files are leaked, lost or otherwise taken out of your control, they will be useless to a thirdparty. Naturally, if you want to access your shared files from another computer, or enable other people to do so, it’s important to set up exactly the same KEncFS configuration on the other end in order to decrypt the files.

These kind of measures are an aid for possibly weaker security of non-P2P communication, where you can never be completely sure that your filesharing is really private and EncFS is a high-performance solution that does encrypting and decrypting very quickly.