Wingman

Wingman is a cli tool for ad-hoc file backups. It is designed to be used in pipes and with existing UNIX shell tools. Furthermore guarding of secret keys should exist outside wingman itself.

Quickstart

Wingman requires a 32 byte secret key. It is read by wingman as 64 char hexstring. Wingman reads this key by the environment variable WINGMAN_USER_KEY. With this wingman may be used.

$ export WINGMAN_USER_KEY=bd6343df2aaf9eb541bee5386787245c7e2a3dd63a02f8029bb0b91ee2b5ef00
$ wingman add /home/bob/file.txt

The above command will create the backup directory /tmp/wingman - if we examine it.

$ ls /tmp/wingman
salt
b31f872cf65390e924bcfd07f069133837242f3d0d4aa5109842ebb1f606e8ba

NOTE: The filename will be different for you.

The directory /tmp/wingman is known as the WINGMAN_ENC_DIR and may also be set with an environment variable.

$ export WINGMAN_USER_KEY=bd6343df2aaf9eb541bee5386787245c7e2a3dd63a02f8029bb0b91ee2b5ef00
$ export WINGMAN_ENC_DIR=/home/bob/.wingman
$ wingman add /home/bob/file.txt

The above command will create an encrypted backup of file.txt to the .wingman directory.

The author envisages WINGMAN_ENC_DIR is a USB stick/network drive etc. Furthermore it is left to the user to keep WINGMAN_USER_KEY safe, somehow, somewhere.

Usage

This section assumes WINGMAN_ENC_DIR and WINGMAN_SECRET_KEY are set in the environment.

Wingman has four commands:

* wingman add
* wingman ls
* wingman cat
* wingman rm

We will add the following file to the encrypted backup.

/home/bob/shopplist

garlic
chopped tomatoes
creamed coconut
spinach
rice
Tomato
onion
cauliflower
cinnamon stick
cloves

To add the file:

$ wingman add /home/bob/shopplist
bb32b5e030174886ceb970d2404f314bb9b82d1ca5a02dc1521ba483493c3982

We note that the output is a unique id of the created file. The author envisages wrapping this with a shell script.

To list the file(s):

$ wingman ls
bb32b5e030174886ceb970d2404f314bb9b82d1ca5a02dc1521ba483493c3982

To print the file to the terminal:

$ wingman cat bb32b5
garlic
chopped tomatoes
creamed coconut
spinach
rice
Tomato
onion
cauliflower
cinnamon stick
cloves

We observe that wingman works with only a prefix of the unique id. An idea taken from git. The prefix must uniquely identify the file and be of at least length 6.

To grep a file without decrypting it to HDD:

$ wingman cat bb32b5 | grep onion
onion

Wingman can also encrypt data directly from stdin so there's no need to make a roundtrip to the HDD. This is done with the special argument - or -0.

$ echo "hello world" | wingman add -0
aaebfad24039d80443ec2e0c3250f7d7c3042ed21fdf37226c7539a3fcf91d8c

Cookbook

Encrypting a Directory:

Either zip or tar may be used for this purpose. To use tar:

$ tar -c /home/bob/some_directory | wingman add -0
d657288c8c5a9bf836cf2c09ca4d58627fdd3d600f3ce2f331ee7f81d037a003

Zsh tab completion for encrypted files.

TODO.