[plug] protecting a tar file

Matt Kemner zombie at penguincare.com.au
Wed Jun 30 23:36:05 WST 2004


On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, quoth Denis Brown:

> I can create a tar archive with something like tar --create --file
> blah.tar dirname/ and all is sweet.   I then want to restrict access to
> the tar file's contents so that it can be safely stored on a remote
> server, say a Windows machine (don't ask!).

For someone to be able to copy the entire tar-file, they need to be able
to read all of it, and therefore have access to all of its contents

Therefore the only way to prevent people from reading the contents is to
encrypt it, as you suggested yourself.  There are no "permissions" you can
set inside, because people have access to the "raw" tar file, just like
file permissions on a hard drive don't prevent access from people who can
access the raw device (by inserting it as a slave to their own HDD for
example)

Regards,

 - Matt




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