Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

Hands-on lab – symmetrically encrypting your own files

You may find GPG useful for encrypting your own files, even when you never plan to share them with anyone else. For this, you'll use symmetric encryption, which involves using your own private key for encryption. Before you try this, you'll need to generate your keys, as I outlined in the previous section:

Symmetric key encryption is, well, just that, symmetric. It's symmetric in the sense that the key that you would use to encrypt a file is the same key that you would use to decrypt the file. That's great for if you're just encrypting files for your own use. But if you need to share an encrypted file with someone else, you'll need to figure out a secure way to give that person the password. ...