EncFS - an Encrypted Filesystem

About

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs in userspace, using the FUSE library for the filesystem interface. EncFS is open source software, licensed under the LGPL.

EncFS was written by necessity over a decade ago by me, @vgough. 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.

Status

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!

GitHub page

GitHub hosting for EncFS is in progress. Until the transition is complete, see also the original, and more complete, introduction page at http://www.arg0.net/encfs