Comments on How to Encrypt your Data with EncFS on Debian 8 (Jessie)
EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use EncFS on Debian Jessie to encrypt your data.
4 Comment(s)
Comments
AlternativesTo.net said that the system is suspicious.
Our admins has flagged this application as 'suspicious'. Be careful if you decide to try it. More info: The author has agreed that EncFS in its current form is dangerous (to security) for several reasons. Wikipedia has a brief summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncFS#General_Security_Concerns The actual audit, which the author participated in, is here: https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm
Sorry
That's what I covered in the security information section of this tutorial already. It depends on how you plan to use the software if the design weaknesses can affect you or not and on the security level that you expect. If you just want to encrypt your data so that its protected in case that your notebook gets stolen or that your housemate don't reads your documents then encfs should be fine as it is easy to use the attacker will not have several copies of the same data. If you try to hide data so that a secret service won't be able to break the encryption, then encfs is probably not the right software for you.
I love EncFS. It is owned and supported by a friendly community. The code is available for public review, so more secure than proprietary options.
As for the security concerns, EncFS version 1.7 is probably safe as long as the adversary only gets one copy of the ciphertext and nothing more. EncFS is not safe if the adversary has the opportunity to see two or more snapshots of the ciphertext at different times.
EncFS version 1.8 and 1.9.1 fixed many of those security concerns. Future versions will hopefull fix all of them.
The version 2.0 was announce. Here is the related message from the author: "I've started cleaning up in order to try and provide a better base for a version 2, but whether EncFS flowers again depends upon community interest. In order to make it easier for anyone to contribute, it is moving a new home on Github. So if you're interested in EncFS, please dive in!" Source at https://github.com/vgough/encfs
I love EncFS. It is owned and supported by a friendly community. The code is available for public review, so more secure than proprietary options.
As for the security concerns, EncFS version 1.7 is probably safe as long as the adversary only gets one copy of the ciphertext and nothing more. EncFS is not safe if the adversary has the opportunity to see two or more snapshots of the ciphertext at different times.
EncFS version 1.8 fixed many of those security concerns. Future versions will hopefull fix all of them.
The version 2.0 was announce. Here is the related message from the author: "I've started cleaning up in order to try and provide a better base for a version 2, but whether EncFS flowers again depends upon community interest. In order to make it easier for anyone to contribute, it is moving a new home on Github. So if you're interested in EncFS, please dive in!" Source at https://github.com/vgough/encfs