Seeking Current Info on Linux Encrypted FS?

slick_rick asks: "I'm looking for info on encrypted file systems under Linux to help my employers company move away from Microsoft centric solutions. However the latest HOWTO is two years old, the latest kernel patch dates back to April (and 2.4.3) and even the Sourceforge project has nearly zero documentation and appears to be very dead. Are slashdotters using encrypted file systems? If so, what are your experiences?" We last talked about this topic, just over a year ago, in this article.

Comments

Maybe for you....

[coyote-san]

Maybe you need deniability, but out here in the real world a lot of people should be using encrypted file systems just to ensure that sensitive or confidential information is not exposed to others if the disk is stolen, the cleaning people are bored, etc.

Personally, I don't want my doctor to have deniability about his records regarding me. Or my lawyer. Or my accountant. And most especially not my banker, financial adviser, etc.

In fact, for these people deniability makes a solution look much less attractive. People get *really* nervous when their accountant or lawyer has strong deniability about what the advice they gave you, about where your money went, etc.

Re:SuSE does this out of the box...

[pwagland]

Indeed the patch is available.

Also, you can get all of the patches that SuSE use on their kernel, not only this one. Please note that this link is

1. A mirror of the official SuSE site, and
2. The SuSE development kernel. I.e. this kernel is not guaranteed for production use!
3. The production kernel source is here.

Lame, Windows XP implementation

[Zeinfeld]

So I happily install XP Professional because it has the ability to use encrypted file stores. This would be just the thing to carry files from one machine to another on a 128Mb Compact flash or so.

Bzztt... wrong...

Turns out that NTFS cannot be used on removable disks, even though the NTFS semantics are better suited (think what happens when a disk is unmounted unexpectedly.

The main reason I use an encrypted disk is that I have a lot of client sensitive info on my machine, including high level strategic plans for a Nasdaq 100 company.

Encrypted disks should be used as a matter of course on machines used by lawyers, doctors, accountants, anyone with a professional confidentiality duty. Laptops get stolen, machines get sold with confidential information still on the drives.

I am more skeptical about the need for encrypting file systems for geeks, after all most sysops would do better to keep less secrets rather than more.