EDDY
Eddy encryption tool
Keeping files safe from prying eyes doesn’t need to be a Herculean trial. Shashank Sharma knows of a utility that makes it a breeze.
Credit: https://github.com/70sh1/eddy
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi, and an avid Arch user. He’s still on the hunt for affordable collectibles of the Terminator franchise.
W ith great power may very well come great responsibility. But with a repository of important files, there definitely comes a need for security. Depending on the nature of the files, of course. While one might certainly feel the need to safeguard the toddler’s attempts at drawing a green-coloured snowman, you needn’t necessarily encrypt such musings. On the other hand, if you do have files that need to be encrypted for safekeeping, Eddy is a useful little utility with no learning curve.
A quarter way into the 21st century, computer tools and apps shouldn’t require users to jump through hoops, or master new concepts and technologies to take advantage of them. One area where this is often lacking is encryption, because while there are tools you can use easily enough, they still inundate users with too much information that overwhelms them. Thankfully, Eddy isn’t one of them. Released under the MIT licence, Eddy is a CLI file encryption tool that can be used to quickly encrypt and decrypt files. It also features a passphrase generator that you can use for stronger encryption. Should an encrypted file become corrupt or damaged, the tool offers the option to force-decrypt the contents. Eddy also stands out from other tools for its reliance on ChaCha20 256-bit cipher instead of the more widely used AES-256 algorithm.