OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
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OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#2Looks useful, although it probably will have problems with all kind of applications that do anything more than just writing new files or directly appending to old ones (e.g. those that add to files by writing the changed version to disk and then swapping it in place -> old, already encrypted parts of the changed file would then be encrypted again)
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#3Exposing filenames in the clear like that is a significant drawback. I'm not sure how you could get around it, though.
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#4Is this essentially the same thing as encrypted loopback filesystems?
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/creat...
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#5Is this essentially the same thing as encrypted loopback filesystems? http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/creat...
No - the primary benefit this filesystem claims is that you can have a system with write access without knowing the private key to read data back, so even if the system is somehow compromised, the attacker doesn't get to read the sensitive data written.
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#6Nice. I'd previously written a similar FUSE-based one-way filesystem, but I never did publish it. "Go laziness!"
The two applications that caught my eye were "home security cameras" (which the docs allude to) and secure telemetry.
You have a device (say, a drone) that logs telemetry data, but if the drone is lost, the data cannot be recovered by a third party without the private key.
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#7Exposing filenames in the clear like that is a significant drawback. I'm not sure how you could get around it, though.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but why can't the filename be encrypted as well?
(So you have public key 0xDEAFBEEF; you want to write a file named 'secret.txt' with the contents 'We attack at dawn'. OweFS encrypts 'We attack at dawn' to 010101 and writes that to 'secret.txt'. But why couldn't it have encrypted the contents to 010101 and encrypted the filename 'secret.txt' to 111000, and then written a file named 111000.encrypted with the contents 010101? Then when the owner of 0xDEAFBEEF wanted to read it, he simply decrypts 111000.encrypted to 'secret.txt' and decrypts its content 010101 to 'We attack at dawn.')
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#8The inability to edit or append to files is not really a fundamental limitation of this approach - it would just require some more bookkeeping. Reading back data, of course, is (by design) impossible.
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#9Heads up to anyone considering using this: the author wrote their own crypto code[1]. I would recommend against using this until that is fixed... I've already spotted a few vulnerabilities.
[1] https://github.com/FedericoCeratto/owefs/blob/master/pycrypt...
Re: OweFS – One-way encrypted file system
#10asymmetric key encryption is quite cpu intensive comparing to , say AES256.
why not use the asymmetric keypair to guard an AES key, and use AES to do the encryption instead, something like what https is doing.