Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee | InfoWorld | Linux file system security options | March 15, 2007 09:18 AM

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Linux file system security options

March 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Linux file system security options

Maybe buying a FDE (Full Disk Encryption) hard drive is not an option for you right now, but that doesn't mean you need to compromise on your Linux file system security.

linux.com has an article on how to hide an entire file system. There are several approaches mentioned in the article, such as using the loop-AES loop back device, or using package such as FUSE or eCryptfs (though these come with performance penalties). Here is another site that provides a lot more options to just simply encrypt your file system the old fashioned way, including encrypting your home directory, using transparent cryptographic file systems, and also steganographic file systems.

There is something for the network file systems as well, you can use SSH File System, which is built-on FUSE, a userspace file system framework for Linux (so normal users can create and mount file systems without super-user privilege). The advantages of SSHFS is that it can be a easy and secure replacement for NFS or other network file system, although I would imagine the performance is not going to be as great due to the encryption.

ReiserFSv4 (sponsored by DARPA) also supports encryption, but it may not be included in your favorite Linux distribution yet, and you may need to manually patch your kernel.

Josh Kuo
Co-Owner of q!Bang Solutions

Mar 16, 2007

Posted by Josh Kuo on March 15, 2007 09:18 AM

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The Reiser4 filesystem supports both ENCRYPTION and compression.

The following table summarizes just how good Reiser4 compression is.

.-------------------------.
| FILESYSTEM | TIME |DISK |
| TYPE       |(secs)|USAGE|
.-------------------------.
|REISER4 lzo | 1938 | 213 |
|REISER4 gzip| 2295 | 278 |
|REISER4     | 3462 | 692 |
|EXT4        | 4408 | 816 |
|EXT2        | 4092 | 816 |
|JFS         | 4225 | 806 |
|EXT3        | 4421 | 816 |
|XFS         | 4625 | 779 |
|REISER3     | 6178 | 793 |
|FAT32       |12342 | 988 |
|NTFS-3g     |10414 | 772 |
.-------------------------.

Column one measures the time taken to complete the bonnie++ benchmarking test (run with the parameters bonnie++ -n128:128k:0)

Column two, Disk Usage: measures the amount of disk used to store 655MB of raw data (which was 3 different copies of the Linux kernel sources).

http://linuxhelp.150m.com/resources/fs-benchmarks.htm (Update)
http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/resources/fs-benchmarks.htm

Posted by: Jade at March 22, 2007 11:18 PM

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