In message <Pine.LNX.3.91.950511182807.22707G-100000@netspace.org>, "Lee J. Sil verman" writes: > I seem to remember that someone (who probably reads this list so >I'll feel terrible if I screw this up, but I think his name is Matt Blaze >and I *think* he works for AT&T) wrote a secure filesystem that uses NFS >on the local machine to interact with an encrypted filesystem. I do not Matt's paper onc CFS is available on the COAST archive at: ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu/pub/doc/cryptography/Crypto-File-System.ps.Z > As you can tell, my information is sketchy. I'm sure someone with >more information will post and tell us where we can learn more. Here is the Abstract for the paper: Although cryptographic techniques are playing an increasingly important role in modern computing system security, user-level tools for encrypting file data are cumbersome and suffer from a number of inherent vulnerabilities. The Cryptographic File System (CFS) pushes encryption services into the file system itself. CFS supports secure storage at the system level through a standard Unix file system interface to encrypted files. Users associate a cryptographic key with the directories they wish to protect. Files in these directories (as well as their pathname components) are transparently encrypted and decrypted with the specified key without further user intervention; cleartext is never stored on a disk or sent to a remote file server. CFS can use any available file system for its underlying storage without modification, including remote file servers such as NFS. System management functions, such as file backup, work in a normal manner and without knowledge of the key . This paper describes the design and implementation of CFS under Unix. Encryption techniques for file system-level encryption are described, and general issues of cryptographic system interfaces to support routine secure computing are discussed. Regards, Mark. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Crosbie mcrosbie@cs.purdue.edu COAST Archive Maintainer security-archive@cs.purdue.edu COAST Group Tel: (317) 494-9313 Dept. of Computer Sciences Fax: (317) 494-0739 1398 Computer Sciences Building, Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398, USA URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/mcrosbie (PGP key available here)