From the Canyon Edge -- :-Dustin

Friday, September 16, 2011

eCryptfs in the Wild

Perhaps you're aware of my involvement in the eCryptfs project, as the maintainer of the ecryptfs-utils userspace tools...

This post is just a collection of some recent news and headlines about the project...

  1. I'm thrilled that eCryptfs' kernel maintainer, Tyler Hicks, joined Canonical's Ubuntu Security Team last month!  He'll be working on the usual Security Updates for stable Ubuntu releases, but he'll also be helping develop, triage and fix eCryptfs kernel bugs, both in the Upstream Linux Kernel, and in Ubuntu's downstream Linux kernel packages.  Welcome Tyler!
  2. More and more and more products seem to be landing in the market, using eCryptfs encryption!  This is, all at the same time, impressive/intimidating/frightening to me :-)
    • Google's ChromeOS uses eCryptfs to securely store browser cache locally (this feature was in fact modeled after Ubuntu Encrypted Private Directory feature, and the guys over at Google even sent me a Cr48 to play with!)
    • We've spotted several NAS solutions on the market running eCryptfs, such as this Synology DS1010+ and the BlackArmor NAS 220 from Seagate
    • Do you know of any others?
  3. I've had several conversations with Android developers recently, who are also quite interested in using eCryptfs to efficiently secure local storage on their devices.  As an avid Android user, I'd love to see this!
  4. There's a company here in Austin, called Gazzang, that's developing Cloud Storage solutions (mostly database backends) backed by eCryptfs.
  5. And there's a start-up in the Bay Area investingating eCryptfs + LXC + MongoDB for added security to their personal storage solution.
Exciting times in eCryptfs-land, for sure!

Which brings me to the point of this post...  We could really use some more community interaction and developer involvement around eCryptfs!
  • Do you know anything about encryption?
  • What about Linux filesystems?
  • Perhaps you're a user who's interested in helping with some bug triage, or willing to help support some other users?
  • We have both kernel, and user space bug-fixing and new development to be done!
  • There's code in both C and Shell that need some love.
  • Heck, even our documentation has plenty of room for improvement!
If you'd like to get involved, drop by #ecryptfs in irc.oftc.net, and poke kirkland or tyhicks.

Cheers,
:-Dustin

1 comment:

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

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