eCryptfs
__NOTOC__{{Lowercase title}}
{{Infobox software
| name = eCryptfs
| logo =
| screenshot =
| caption =
| author = Michael Halcrow, IBM Linux Technology Center, Erez Zadok
| released = {{Start date and age|2006|11|30}}
| latest release version = 111
| latest release date = {{Start date and age|2016|05|02}}
| programming language = C
| operating system = Linux
| platform = Linux kernel
| genre = filesystem, encryption
| license = GPL v2+
| website = {{URL|https://ecryptfs.org/}}
}}
eCryptfs (enterprise cryptographic filesystem) is a package of disk encryption software for Linux. Its implementation is a POSIX-compliant{{cite web
| url=https://ecryptfs.org/about.html
| title=About the project
| date=2012
| access-date=2018-11-15}} filesystem-level encryption layer, aiming to offer functionality similar to that of GnuPG at the operating system level,{{r|symp}} and has been part of the Linux kernel since version 2.6.19.
Details
The eCryptfs package has been included in Ubuntu since version 9.04 to implement Ubuntu's encrypted home directory feature,{{cite web
| url=https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedHome
| title=Ubuntu CommunityHelpWiki: EncryptedHome
| date=2014-11-24
| author=Ian Nicholson
| access-date=2018-11-15}} but is now deprecated{{cite web
| url=https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/security-ecryptfs
| title=Ubuntu CommunityHelpWiki: EncryptedHome
| date=2014-11-24
| author=Ian Nicholson
| access-date=2018-11-15}}
eCryptfs is derived from Erez Zadok's Cryptfs.{{cite web|url=https://launchpad.net/ecryptfs/|title=eCryptfs – Enterprise Cryptographic Filesystem}} It uses a variant of the OpenPGP file format for encrypted data, extended to allow random access, storing cryptographic metadata (including a per-file randomly generated session key) with each individual file.{{cite conference
| first=Michael Austin
| last=Halcrow
| title=eCryptfs: An Enterprise-class Encrypted Filesystem for Linux
| conference=Proc. Linux Symposium
| volume=1
| year=2005
| url=http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/linuxsymposium_procv1.pdf
| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080916022422/http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/linuxsymposium_procv1.pdf
| archive-date=2008-09-16
| url-status=dead
| access-date=2020-04-10}}
It also encrypts file and directory names which makes them internally longer (average one third). The reason is it needs to uuencode the encrypted names to eliminate unwanted characters in the resulting name.
This lowers the maximum usable byte name length of the original file system entry depending on the used file system (this can lead to four times fewer characters for example for Asian utf-8 file names).
See also
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ECryptfs ArchWiki: System Encryption with eCryptfs]
- [https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/dustinkirkland/ecryptfs-utils/blob/master/doc/ecryptfs-faq.html eCryptfs FAQ]
- [https://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/cryptfs/cryptfs.html Cryptfs: A Stackable Vnode Level Encryption File System] (Zadok et al., 1999)