Tomb - ArchWiki

# Tomb

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From the official website:

  Tomb is 100% free and open source software to make strong encryption easy to use.
  A tomb is like a locked folder that can be safely transported and hidden in a filesystem.
  Keys can be kept separate: for instance the tomb on your computer and the key on a USB stick.

Tomb aims to be a really simple to use software to manage "encrypted directories", called tombs. A tomb can only be opened if you both have a keyfile and you know the password. It also has advanced features, like steganography.

You can install tomb from the Arch User Repository.

## Installation

Install tomb or tomb-git from the Arch User Repository.

## Usage

Tomb is meant to be used from the console as a single, non-interactive script. it also provides tomb-open, which is a simple interactive script to help you create a tomb, open it, retrieve keys from USB.

Tombs are operated from a terminal commandline and require root access to the machine (or just sudo access to the script).

To create a 100MB tomb called "secret" do:

    # tomb dig -s 100 secret.tomb
    # tomb forge secret.tomb.key
    # tomb lock secret.tomb -k secret.tomb.key

To open it, do:

    # tomb open secret.tomb -k secret.tomb.key

And after you are done:

    # tomb close

For more information see `tomb -h` and `man tomb`.

## Advanced features

- steganography (to hide the key inside a jpeg/wav file)
- bind hooks: can mount some of its subdirectories as "bind" to some other. Suppose, for example, you would like to encrypt your .Mail, .firefox and Documents directories. Then you can create a tomb which contains these subdirectories (and others too, if you want) and create a simple configuration file inside the tomb itself; when you run `tomb open` it will automatically bind that directories into the right places. This way you will easily get an encrypted firefox profile, or maildir.
- post hooks: commands that are run when the tomb is open, or closed. You can imagine lot of things for this: open files inside the tomb, put your computer in a "paranoid" status (for example, disabling swap), whatever.

## See also

- manpage
- home page
- quickstart
- advanced features

Category:

- Security