Backup of David's Google+ Posts

If you encrypt a 7z archive with 7z's encryption, attackers can still navigate the hierarchy of the archive, it's only the compressed files within the hierarchy that are encrypted. So you can leave messages to the attackers in the names of the directories. I like to imagine the president having an archive of nuclear launch codes that he mis-named as baby_pictures.zip, but left a message to the attackers like in the picture below. (A real picture of an encrypted zip file in Google Drive.)

If you want your encrypted archive to be opaque, you have to make the tarball first, then encrypt that in a second step. #security