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I am designing my backup system to Amazon S3 (probably Singapore) and I would like to have all my files strongly encrypted on the server. I use ArchLinux x64. My system will append only once an encrypted folder is upload nothing inside this folder will change. eg. I have documents and each month I will upload a folder for that month.

please note I do not want to use Amazon SSE something about them having the keys to my data feels like a waste of time to me (I may use this in addition to what I describe below).

I wish to do the following (to encrypt the folder foo):

  1. sha512 every file in foo and place the list of hashes in foo/hashes.sha512
  2. dd if=/dev/urandom | tr -dc '[:print:]' | fold -w 256 | head -n 1 > foo.key
  3. tar -cvjO "foo" | openssl aes-256-cbc -salt -kfile foo.key | dd of="foo.enc"
  4. sha512sum foo.enc >> foo.key (openssl only reads the first line for the key)
  5. sha512sum foo/hashes.sha512 >> foo.key
  6. openssl aes-256-cbc -salt -in foo.key -out foo.key.enc
  7. Manually specify password
  8. Upload foo.enc to S3
  9. Keep foo.key.enc safe!

I have a few key questions:

  • Is this a proper use of each of these tools?
  • Is using /dev/urandom a good method of generating a password?
  • Is my method of storing locally the file encrypted with the weaker key (the one I remember) and only uploading the files that are encrypted with the larger unique keys as strong as it seems?
  • What is the largest value I can put in as the key value for openssl?
  • Any obvious serious issues?
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    Why not use a standard tool like duplicity (which supports encryption using gpg and using S3 as storage out of the box)?
    – Yoav Aner
    Jun 24, 2012 at 7:06
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    "Is using /dev/urandom a good method of generating a password?" No, it's a good method to generate a key.
    – curiousguy
    Jun 24, 2012 at 13:22

1 Answer 1

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+1 for Yoav Aner's comment.

I don't have any particular experience with the questions you asked, but it seems like designing such a system from scratch without any prior knowledge and experience will only lead to trouble.

Is there are particular reason you do not want to use premade tools?

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