Re: Passing dar encryption passwords

On 07/01/2022 17:33, David Niklas wrote:
> Hello,

Hello David,

> I'm using Dar 2.5.17.
whaoo, that's a not a recent one :) but no problem

> I'm using the -K option to encrypt a full backup. I then tried to create
> a separate catalog for each file. I'm invoking dar like this, but with a
> config file (DCF):
> dar -C backup-cat -A backup -K algorithm:password -3 sha512
> 
> Now my intention is to have both the backup and backup-cat file
> encrypted. I think dar is doing this,

yes it can do that,

> but it asks for a password to
> decrypt the backup archive so that it can isolate the catalog.

of course you need the key to read the backup content

>   I thought that the -J option was to be used with the -A option so that
> you could give dar the password without having to retype it a million
> times, but the man page specifies that the -J option is not needed
> anymore. 

-J (and -K when reading an archive) is not needed because dar now
detects when a backup is encrypted, reads the encryption algorithm from
the backup header but still needs a key to decipher the data. Else if
you could read your backup without password, anybody could do the same
and your data would not be protected...

But as you know, while it is not required, you can still use -J option
to specify the key (from a DCF file for example) in order to decipher
the backup or reference avoiding dar asking for the password interactively.

> However, even with -J, I'm still getting prompted for a
> password to open the backup archive.

Strange, it should not be the case. Maybe you have conditional
statements in your DCF file?

In any case, I would add -v option as first argument to dar and looking
at dar's output I  would check that -J option (and its key) is really
parsed as expected.

> 
> How do I give dar the password to use for both the backup archive and the
> catalog extract?

In order to avoid interactive password requests from dar, you should use
something like this:

dar -C backup-cat -A backup -K algo:password-cat -J password-backup ...

If you have a colon (:) in password-backup, check the -K option
description in dar's man page for pitfall and best practices.

> 
> Thanks,
> David
> 

Cheers,
Denis