Re: Encrypted Filesystem

From: Hans Reiser
Date: Tue Jan 27 2004 - 16:53:01 EST


Michael Halcrow wrote:


I am
aware of reiser4; Hans may remember having lunch with me at the
DISCEX-III conference in Washington, D.C. last year. My booth (the
BYU Internet Security Research Lab; Trust Negotiation) was right
across from his:

http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/discex/2003/1897/02/1897toc.htm

He had a lengthy discussion with Jason Holt[2] on the implementation
of crypto in reiser4.

While I appreciate the security features that are part of reiser4, my
efforts toward filesystem encryption are aimed at a more general
level, to provide an encryption layer that will work across several
filesystems. Perhaps we can look into unifying and abstracting the
key management, authentication, and other aspects involved in a
comprehensive filesystem encryption system, extending and using kernel
structures (struct file, kobject/sysfs, etc.) to maintain that data,
so whether someone is using reiser4, Security Enhanced ext3 (SEext3),
or Security Enhanced jfs (SEjfs)[3], the interface to userland will be
the same.


I am in principle interested in doing this, especially since the area of our inspiration is not in key management but in performance.


[2] Hans: Jason was a co-worker of mine in the ISRL, skinny and tall
with curly red hair (he's hard to forget once you've met him:
<http://isrl.cs.byu.edu/images/Dcp02290.jpg>)


Jason is working on a write only plugin (or at least he said so a few months ago) for reiser4. You probably remember him discussing it then. Where is your photo, or are you a CIA spy who needs to keep it secret....;-) I remember three interesting people talked to me all at once at that conference about reiser4 crypto and other things that crept into that conversation, if you send your photo I can know if I remember correctly which one other than Jason you were.

[3] That was meant to be funny...
.___________________________________________________________________.
Michael A. Halcrow Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center GnuPG Fingerprint: 05B5 08A8 713A 64C1 D35D 2371 2D3C FDDA 3EB6 601D




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