Want to password protect your files in Linux? Here’s a stupid simple app to do the job for beginners.

There are quite a few ways to secure your data in Linux, e.g., encrypt the whole disk, encrypt a folder, or compress files into encrypted archive.

For individual files, the GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) command line tool is great for the encryption, and the new Hideout graphical front-end make it easy to use for beginners.

Hideout

As you see in the screenshot, simply launch the app, select file (or drag’n’drop file into app window), choose encrypt or decrypt, input passphrase, and click start.

It will make a copy of the original input file into new encrypted .gpg file, though you may rename it to whatever name with whatever extension. After that, share that encrypted file to your friends or upload to the cloud, and only the ones who have the passphrase can decrypt then read the file content.

As mentioned, the app is based on GPG, the free open-source tool that many Linux Distributions use for signing software repositories, and Email Clients (e.g., Thunderbird) use it for end-to-end encryption and and digital signatures.

It by default uses AES256 cipher algorithm for passphrase based encryption in all current Ubuntu releases. It’s very secure as long as your passphrase is long and strong enough.

And, advanced users may use the commands below instead to encrypt or decrypt files.

• To encrypt a file with a password:

  gpg --symmetric input_file

• To decrypt a GPG file:

  gpg --output output_file --decrypt input_file.gpg

Both commands will pop-up a dialog ask to input your passphrase.

For choice, add --batch --pinentry-mode loopback --passphrase "your_passphrase" flags before --symmetric or --decrypt to tell the passphrase within the command, which may be useful for server use.

How to Install Hideout

The source of the app is available in Github via this page.

For Ubuntu, it provides official snap package (so far only for modern Intel/AMD platform) that can be easily installed from either App Center or Ubuntu Software.

Linux Mint and Fedora Workstation can install the app from either Software Manager or GNOME Software through the official Flatpak package (support both amd64 and arm64/aarch64).

While, other Linux Distributions may do the steps below one by one to install the Flatpak package:

• First, enable Flatpak support. For Debian/Ubuntu, simply open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

  sudo apt install flatpak

• Then, install the Hideout flatpak package:

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/it.andreafontana.hideout.flatpakref

If this is the first time you install a Flatpak package, then either log out and back in to apply environment change (for app icon visible), or start the app from command line:

flatpak run it.andreafontana.hideout