GBDE-GEOM Based Disk Encryption on FreeBSD

BSD Forums writes "The ever increasing mobility of computers has made protection of data on digital storage media an important requirement in a number of applications and situations. GBDE is a strong cryptographic facility for denying unauthorised access to data stored on a 'cold' disk for decades and longer. GBDE operates on the disk(-partition) level allowing any type of file system or database to be protected. A significant focus has been put on the practical aspects in order to make it possible to deploy GBDE in the real world. FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp says in an email to freebsd-current that he has uploaded this paper and slides which he presented at BSDcon 2003, California, USA."

Comments

Interoperability issues

[chrysalis]

This is not a new idea.

OpenBSD (vn* devices) and Linux (crypto-loop) have this for years. NetBSD also has it. Windows XP also has it.

Now FreeBSD introduces yet another implementation of the same thing.

This is great, but what about interoperability?

Right now, all operating systems I can use encrypted partitions, but the way they do it is different on every system.

If I encrypt my USB memory key on FreeBSD, I won't be able to use it on Linux. Even if the actual file system is the same, even if the encryption algorithm is the same.

This is illogical. Encrypted partitions are nice for small, portable devices, that you can plug on various hosts running various operating systems. That's the theory. But because everyone reinvents the wheel, you can't do that. It won't work.

Now that we have filesystems that almost any operating system out there has support for (ext2/ext3 and vfat), maybe it would be nice to use a common format for the encryption layer.