I have used Tails for some time but am now just starting to use it heavily. In particular, I want a simple way to encrypt files for attachment to emails which will be sent to non-technical users. The obvious solution (which I have used in the past for other Linux systems) is to compress and encrypt them with 7zip. However, when I attempt this technique with Tails, I am not offered the option of encryption with 7zip. Anyone know why the option is not available? As nearly as I can tell, the full 7zip package is installed by default.
I looked into using the Encrypt Zip menu selection, and it does work, but I have always avoided that app because of weak encryption. Now I understand from some sources that it is AES256-compliant, but others say it is still the old system. Does anyone know anything for sure about the TAILS implementation of this package?
My correspondents do not have the technical skills to use command lines, Vera-crypt, or PGP, so those techniques are not solutions for me.
Debian Trixie, the foundation of latest versions of Tails, uses GNOME version 48, which doesn’t support encrypted 7-zip yet. If you want to create encrypted 7-zip files, you may use the File Roller app preinstalled with GNOME and use “New Archive” to do so manually.
Note that 7z files created this way has to be opened by file roller instead of double left click (default operation in GNOME is “Extract” without using file roller). You can right click the file, “Open With” and choose File Roller. GNOME currently doesn’t support extracting encrypted 7-zip files.
If you create an encrypted zip from GNOME, you create a zip file with file content encrypted with AES-256. ZipCrypto (the vulnerable encryption algorithm previously used by zip encryption) has largely been phased out since most archive programs we use today already supports AES-256 encrypted zip, so there’s no reason to maintain backward compatibility.
However, encrypted zip doesn’t protect the file names from being learned by unwanted snoopers, and that could be a potential problem, depending on your situation and threat modeling. You may want to switch to encrypted 7z archives (with file name encryption) if that might be a concern for you.
