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On Sun, 2004-01-18 at 23:09, Vincent Cox wrote:<BR>
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Also this link for another way of doing it, just came across this site
the other day.
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<A HREF="http://arg0.net/users/vgough/encfs.html"><U>http://arg0.net/users/vgough/encfs.html</U></A>
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I have thought about trying it out but have never got around to it, what
I am concerned about is
1. File system speed, how much of an impact is this going to have on the
system.
2. What about recoverability. Suppose you have to re-install/change
distro for what ever reason, will the encrypted
files be recoverable.
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Interesting coincidence.. That happens to be my web site, so I can give some opinions on options (although they may well be biased). I'll mention speed later, but for recoverability, everything necessary to recover the data is stored in the base filesystem. However if you forget the password, then forget it, because there is no password recovery included.<BR>
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Like Donald mentioned earlier in the thread, encrypted partitions don't really guarantee security of the data. If your system has an encrypted partition at the time it is compromised, then there is a good chance your encrypted files will be compromised as well.<BR>
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The reason I wrote EncFS was to protect files in the case my laptop was stolen. The difference being that it is meant to protect against the case of the computer being compromised when the partition is *not* mounted. <BR>
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EncFS is an instance of a pass-through filesystem, which means that it does not deal with storage issues itself but instead encrypts everything and passes it down to another filesystem layer. This has some advantages and some disadvantages, which I try to summarize on the web page. I consider the advantages to greatly outweigh the disadvantages (my bias here), which is why it is designed the way it is. <BR>
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Many years ago when I traveled for business with a laptop full of proprietary source code, I used CFS (Matt Blaze's original encrypted filesystem) or TCFS (a much more feature-full and complex filesystem from Italy) to store encrypted data. Both solutions used variations on NFS, and were somewhat slow (especially on a 90Mhz laptop). EncFS is nearly invisible on my machine, in that it is nearly undetectable in benchmarks like bonnie++ because it can encipher and decipher data faster then the disk can read and write it. But a lot of that is due to increases in computer speeds -- my laptop now has a 1.6Ghz Pentium-M processor..<BR>
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I'm happy to answer any questions if I can. But I agree with Donald's suggestion, that you will accomplish more by thinking about what sort of threats you want to protect against, an go from there.<BR>
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regards,<BR>
Valient<BR>
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