Re:Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain...
by shittyadmin on Saturday August 11, 2018 @01:38AM
(#17738538)
Ah, you're right, I had it confused with a similar analysis on EncFS which had more significantly damaging findings.
https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm
I wasn't even aware Ext4 had native encryption support though! I'll definitely have to give that a go. Thanks for the tip.
Re:Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain...
by colint on Friday August 17, 2018 @07:34AM
(#17781975)
According to Michael Halcrow's LinkedIn [1], he was heavily involved on the EXT4 encryption:
"I was also the project lead for encryption in EXT4, which is now available as the mechanism implementing file-based encryption on Android."
"Series of issues?" Really? There were 3, and they were all scored "Low" by the authors for exploitability and security impact.
That said, I generally agree FDE is the way to go if your platform's constraints allow for it -- but only for security. Native EXT4 encryption will give you equal or better performance than FDE primarily because the file system metadata isn't encrypted. Which isn't to say that's a good tradeoff -- it's just the nature of the beast.
Because of performance and functionality issues (file name length, possibility of page cache inconsistency) eCryptfs shouldn't be used for anything any more.