Nowadays, ECryptfs is a topic that has gained great relevance in modern society. Since its appearance, it has generated a great debate in various areas, whether in politics, economics, health or technology. ECryptfs has captured the attention of experts and neophytes alike, due to its impact on people's daily lives and the shaping of today's world. In this article, we will explore the different aspects related to ECryptfs, analyzing its implications and challenges, as well as the possible solutions that can arise from understanding it.
| Original author(s) | Michael Halcrow, IBM Linux Technology Center, Erez Zadok |
|---|---|
| Initial release | November 30, 2006 |
| Stable release | 111
/ May 2, 2016 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Linux |
| Platform | Linux kernel |
| Type | filesystem, encryption |
| License | GPL v2+ |
| Website | ecryptfs |
eCryptfs (enterprise cryptographic filesystem) is a package of disk encryption software for Linux. Its implementation is a POSIX-compliant 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.
The eCryptfs package has been included in Ubuntu since version 9.04 to implement Ubuntu's encrypted home directory feature, but is now deprecated
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.
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).