Hello. I was wondering about some way to protect the passwords potentially stored in the mutt rc files (i have multiple acccounts, and I feel unconfortable remembering and typing all of them each time using mutt) on my Linux laptop.
My main concern is about them being stored in plaintext, which is a little dangerous when using a laptop and traveling: there is identity theft potential. A widely solution would be to encrypt the filesystem on which the configuration files reside. This, however is IMHO a little oversized solution in the case the main privacy concern, like in my case, is about a bunch of text files. So lately I'm experimenting a more gentle approach, namely using a file (stored in my home directory) encrypted with LUKS, containing a directory containing the important data (a passwords-only .muttrc, a .msmtprc, a .fetchmailrc, and an .isyncrc). Setting some sudo stuff, and configuring my bash aliases, I get this mini-filesystem mounted with ease - namely obtaining a 'lightweight personal solution' for mail passwords protection. But how about storing a whole encrypted muttrc file and letting mutt to decrypt it with some passphrase ? Say, using the vim encryption algorithm (the one you trigger when saving a file with :X in the vim inner commandline), one would get a quite simple and lightweight security measure, without the need of filesystem messing and getting a 'natural' way of editing the muttrc. I reported the Vim encryption solution because it sounds 'simple' and 'natural' to me, (and Vim encrypted files can be 'recognized' by having a "VimCrypt" signature in the first bytes) But I know, vim is not the only text editor around here :) . Has anybody thought or heard of a solution like this, or similar ? -- Michele Martone http://claudius.ce.uniroma2.it/~martone
