I have a new diary program, and while I like the program overall there is one important feature missing: password protection. Is there a way to make it so the program won't open without my password?
EDIT: The name of the program is RedNotebook
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2Hi Guinevere! Can you please edit your question to include the name of the diary program in question? Each application stores data differently, and what you're really asking for is a way to lock the data, not the program. – tudor -Reinstate Monica- Nov 13 '19 at 03:55
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I added the name of the program and a link to it's home page. The reason I asked for a way to lock the program is that as far as I can tell the data is saved in it's local folder. It doesn't save it the way a word processor would. – Guinevere Ellen Mayberry Nov 13 '19 at 12:21
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RedNotebook advertises on it's own website that the "data is stored in plain text files".
Regardless, locking down a program is never the approach to take when protecting data because the data and the program are always separate. So long as I can get access to the data, I can interrogate it even if the program itself uses encryption, and even if the program no longer exists (by using reverse engineering).
Trivially, this means that if someone were to gain access to those files, they could easily copy them and open them with their own copy of RedNotebook.
So, what you really want to do is protect the data. The easiest way to do this is to encrypt the folder that stores that data.
Rednotebook appears to store its data in the folder ~/.rednotebook/data, but I'd probably encrypt the whole ~/.rednotebook folder just to be safe. Note that this folder is not really "hidden" (in the sense of security) as such (although that's what it's sometimes called), but it won't show up in Nautilus or ls by default. You have to either "Show hidden folders" or do ls -a.
We already have a question relating to How to encrypt folders, so I'm not going to duplicate that here.
tudor -Reinstate Monica-
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