1. What is it ?

Description: KFileCoder is a KDE utility which encodes files in an archive with a password. People who don't have the password won't be able to read data. For example, you can encode all files of you /home/user/website directory in /home/user/website.kfc, and send it to people who have the password.

In the last version, it's possible to compress files before adding them to the archive. You can choose 3 levels: None, Gzip, and Bzip2. Gzip is fast an good, and bzip2 can be better than gzip on big files, but is very slow. Bzip2 can be used to encode big files in an archive, to send it using a 56 K modem.

KFileCoder use the PC1 algorithm. It's a hard encryption 128 bits algorithm. Each file is encoded with a different password, then if someone can find the password which was used to encode a file of the archive, he won't be able to decode other files, unlike with the zip format.

Filenames are encoded too. Then, the password is need to know what files are in the archive. There is a password test function, which is used when opening an archive. It check the password and fail to open the archive isf the password is false. But the password is not written in the archive, and this check can't help hackers to calculate the password, unlike words documents, where the password is written and just hidden in the file.

KFileCoder allows to check files: a warning is shown on extracting if extraction files are differents than the original files. A 128 bits hash is used to do it. It can be used to check all files of the archive without extracting them to the disk: data are extracted in the memory and checked, but nothing is written. It's an easy way to check an archive you have just received.

Please, report all bugs you find in the application.

You can see the sourceforge project page to have more informations about this project, and this home page traffic stats.

License: GPL 2 (GNU Public License version 2)

State: Stable

Languages: English, German and French

Author: Francois Dupoux (main author) and Alexandre Pukall (PC1, PC2 and PSCHF author)

Operating System: Linux with Qt-3.x and KDE-3.x

2. Screenshot

Since version 0.4.0, you can choose your algorithm:

 

3. Download

Since the 0.4.0 version, a new file format is used ! Then, archives made with older versions (until 0.3.6) are uncompatible with archives made with the 0.4 version. You should keep an old version, to be able to read all data you have. This new file format allow you to use a new algorithm, better than XOR, and then there is more security. But 0.5.x and 0.6.x versions use the same file format.

KDE 3.x version

Source codein tar.bz2 format to compile:

kfilecoder-0.6.0.tar.bz2 (523 KB)

 

KDE 2.x version

Source code in tar.bz2 format to compile:

kfilecoder-0.5.0.tar.bz2 (285 KB)

 

KDE 1.x versions

The last version of KFileCoder for KDE 1.x is 0.2.7. You can download it from the download page

 

To compile sources, you need a C++ compiler. First, expand the sources: tar xfI kfilecoder-x.y.z.tar.bz2 Then, cd in the main directory of the project, and type ./configure && make && make install. (don't forget the point before configure)

To install a binary version from a RPM package, you need the RPM utility, and you type: rpm -ivh kfilecoder-x.y.z.i386.rpm

4. Contribute

Everybody is welcome to contribute to the KFileCoder project. To do it, just e-mail to the author, and write him what you can do. Please, before making any change in the project, download the latest version: don't make changes in an older version !

You needn't to be programmer to contribute. We also need to do:

If you need it, Sourceforge allows us to use a CVS server for this project. If you need it to work on KFileCoder, I can open you an account.

You can read the TODO file for more details

5. Changes log

0.6.0: (2002-12-17)
- German (de) translation from Ingo Busse

0.6.0-pre1: (2002-07-06)
- Ported to KDE 3

0.5.0: (2000-10-31)
- IDEA algorithm
- Ready for KDE-2.00-final

0.4.1: (2000-09-17)
- Bug fixes
- Compilation for KDE-1.94

0.4.0: (2000-07-21)
- New file format, with 64 bits file sizes, 128 bits hashs instead of CRC32, new password test, more informations about files (owner, date/time, ...)
- The check feature, to check files of the archive are not damaged, without extracting them
- New algorithm (PC1) to encrypt files with more security
- Compression support with gzip and bzip2
- Help in SGML and HTML format (introduction, installation, usage, developers information)

0.3.6: (2000-06-07)
- Project moved to sourceforge.net

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