EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs with regular user -permissions using the FUSE library to act as a filesystem. -EncFS is open source software, licensed under the LGPL.
- -EncFS was written due to necessity over a decade ago. At the time, -older NFS-loopback based encrypted filesystems such as CFS had not kept pace with Linux -development. When FUSE became available, I wrote a CFS replacement for my own -use and released the first version to Open Source in 2003.
- -As with most encrypted filesystems, EncFS was meant to provide security against -off-line attacks; ie your notebook or backups are left in a taxi by mistake, stolen, etc. -In order to avoid having a dedicated partition size, EncFS encrypts individual files, -by translating all requests for the virtual EncFS filesystem into the equivalent -encrypted operations on the raw filesystem.
- -Over the last decade, a number of good alternatives have grown up. Computing
-power has increased to the point where it is reasonable to encrypt the entire
-filesystem of personal computers. On Linux, ecryptfs
-provides a nice dynamically mountable encrypted home directory, and is well
-integrated in distributions I use, such as Ubuntu.
-Every compute I use, including my mobile phones, use full-disk encryption.
-However there always seem to be new use cases for userspace file-by-file encryption,
-so EncFS remains useful.
EncFS has been dormant for a while. 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, I'm looking at Github as the next home for EncFS. So if you're -interested in EncFS, please dive in!
+permissions using the FUSE library. +EncFS is Open Source software. +The EncFS library is licensed under the +LGPL.To submit changes to EncFS, or to submit a bug ticket, see the +EncFS GitHub page. +
GitHub hosting for EncFS is in progress. Until the transition is complete, see also the original, and more complete, introduction page at the old arg0.net