Linux Files System Encryption

Encryption of files on a server is often the last gate in keeping unauthorized users from gaining access to sensitive data. File-level encryption is prevalent with tools like PGP. Unfortunately file-level encryption still exposes the OS structure of a server to the hacker. Plus, managing the encryption/decryption of individual files can be expense from a system resource perspective. An alternative would be to encrypt the entire file system and perform the encryption/decryption at the file system level on the fly.

With the introduction of disk encryption on Cisco WAAS 4.0.13 I decided to dig in a little bit into linux file system encryption and see how that’s usually done in the open source community.

For the linux kernel jockies, the Linux Documentation Project spells out a step-by-step process to recompile your linux server’s kernel and setting it up to support disk encryption. For those that simply want to review the various approaches to encrypting disk w/ Linux, this page lists out tools like CryptFS, StegFS, and Virtual Private Disk.