Cross-platform file encryption tool

Question

I would like to know if there is an encryption tool that works on both, Ubuntu and Windows, that can encrypt single or multiple files of any kind (not only e-mails or text).

I already have checked TrueCrypt, but it's not what I'm looking for. What I want is an encryption tool that I can right click on a file, select "encrypt", set a password and done. It's also important that the file could be decrypted on Windows as well. The goal is safely share encrypted files trough free hosting sites or DropBox.

I appreciate any help.

Answer 1

If you don't like the look of GPG, my suggestion would be an open source program called AES Crypt. It is GUI based, but only for Windows and Mac (although it has a terminal/command line interface if you so wish). It works across Windows, Linux and Mac. You can use any password you wish and it will create a .aes file that is encrypted.

Encrypting and decrypting on Windows looks like this.

Encrypting on Linux would look like this (where apples is the password) (The -e flag is encrypt and the -d flag is decrypt):

aescrypt -e -p apples picture.jpg
aescrypt -d -p apples picture.jpg.aes

It appears much more simple than GPG, hopefully it'll work for you.

Answer 2

For single files I suggest gpg. Works on Linux and Windows

http://www.gpg4win.org/download.html

encrypt

gpg -c file_to_encrypt

decrypt

gpg file_to_encrypt.gpg

multiple files

Since you are interested in cross platform, put them in a .zip and encrypt the archive.

grpahical front end

You can use seahorse-plugins for nautilus integration

See http://savvyadmin.com/gnupg-context-menu-options-for-gnome-nautilus/

There are other graphical font ends as well

http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html#gui