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Encryption

DISCUSSION Carl Cook 3 participants 3 messages Jan 20, 2011 Btrfs file system

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Carl Cook

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Does BTRFS have subvolume encryption built in? If not, why?

#1 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines · Carl Cook

Does BTRFS have subvolume encryption built in? If not, why?

Not at the moment.

My opinion on why: Getting crypto right is *hard*. There are far
easier features that people are asking for that we can implement first.

There may be technical issues that make it hard to implement within
btrfs, although being able to do compression is harder from a FS structure point of view, so I suspect that the issues are more about ensuring correctness of the crypto implementation (not just the basic symmetric algorithm, because we've got those in the kernel, but all the key management and block chaining and probably a bunch of things I don't know about because I'm not a cryptographer -- all of which makes a big difference to the security of the final system).

Hugo.

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#2 lore raw
In reply to Carl Cook
Quoted 3 lines · Carl Cook

Does BTRFS have subvolume encryption built in? If not, why?

No, and because nobody has done it yet. Thanks,

Josef