Encrypt filesystems with EncFS and Loop-AES - The Community's Center for Security


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Encrypt filesystems with EncFS and Loop-AES

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Source: Linux.com - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas

Encrypted filesystems may be overkill for family photos or your résumé, but they make sense for network-accessible servers that hold sensitive business documents, databases that contain credit-card information, offline backups, and laptops. EncFS and Loop-AES, which are both released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), are two approaches to encrypting Linux filesystems. I'll compare the two and then look at other alternatives.

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in userspace and runs without any special permissions. In fact, it's not so much a filesystem as a program that translates requests (encrypting or decrypting them as appropriate) and passes them to the underlying filesystem.

Read this full article at Linux.com

Comments

nope, it's for laptops

Written by the ED on 2006-04-03 12:33:29

The advantage of an encrypted filesystem is to eliminate the threat of data loss due to physical security breaches. Servers are typically hacked over the network, they don't usually have problems like people coming in and stealing the hard drives. The OS can still read the FS, so encrypted filesystems don't solve the problem of network hacks.

Having your home directory on your work laptop with all of your private blank-password ssh keys to all of your servers and your e-mail and contact lists, etc held under an encrypted filesystem is of great benefit if someone steals your laptop. In the server room, physical security is already cumbersome and necessary, and encrypting the filesystem only increases cost of performance and decreases reliability. For servers, this solves a non-problem and degrades critical things like reliability and throughput.

Although, I suppose, if you run your web server from a laptop in an unlocked shed with a T1 line coming down from the nearest telephone pole, then you may be concerned with physical security on your server.

That's the world as I see it. Thank you for the opportunity to rant.

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