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ECryptfs

Package of disk encryption software for Linux

Field	Value
name	eCryptfs
author	Michael Halcrow, IBM Linux Technology Center, Erez Zadok
released
latest release version	111
latest release date
programming language	C
operating system	Linux
platform	Linux kernel
genre	filesystem, encryption
license	GPL v2+
website

NOTOC

eCryptfs (enterprise cryptographic filesystem) is a package of disk encryption software for Linux. Its implementation is a POSIX-compliant{{cite web | access-date=2018-11-15}} filesystem-level encryption layer, aiming to offer functionality similar to that of GnuPG at the operating system level, 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 | access-date=2018-11-15}} but is now deprecated{{cite web | access-date=2018-11-15}}

eCryptfs is derived from Erez Zadok's Cryptfs. 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 | 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).

References

"eCryptfs – Enterprise Cryptographic Filesystem".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

cryptographic-software disk-encryption

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