Re: [gentoo-user] encrypting file for Windows users

[Mick]

On Sunday 23 Apr 2017 16:42:12 thelma@×××××××××××.com wrote:
> I'm looking for a solution to encrypt and attachment to Windows users.
> gpg does not support "sda" Self Decrypting Archives.
>
> Occasionally I have to send an attachment via email and would prefer if
> the file was encrypted.  Asking Windows users to use PGP is almost
> impossible.
> Sending them txt.exe and asking the to run it will not go well.


What is it you want to encrypt?  An email?  An attachment?  Both?

For email inc. attachments you can use SSL Certificates with S/MIME.  MS 
Outlook can handle S/MIME encrypted emails natively and you can get SSL 
Certificates from a variety of CAs, some of them free for personal use.  You 
can always use self-signed certificates, but initially you will have to guide 
your recipients to store the self-signed certificates and mark them as trusted 
on their PCs.

Alternatively, you can install gpg4Win on MS PCs and use that to exchange PGP 
encrypted messages and attachments.  Your recipients may need some training to 
familiarize themselves with the gpg4Win interface, but it is not that 
dissimilar to MS Outlook's S/MIME GUI.

Thunderbird can deal with both PGP & S/MIME using Enigmail.

If you only need to encrypt attachments (files/directories) besides the above 
solutions (gpg4win will also encrypt/decrypt files separately to emails), you 
can use zip/7zip and encrypt with a symmetric key the contents of the 
generated archive.  You will need of course to share the encryption password 
for the zipped archive with your recipients securely off line.

PS. 7z can create self-extracting archives and I had looked into this in the 
past, but I was not able to make it work off the peg in Gentoo.  It kept 
asking about /usr/lib64/p7zip/7z.sfx which is not installed by default with 
7zip.  After some failed attempts I gave up and sought alternatives.
-- 
Regards,
Mick