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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cs.utexas.edu!venus.sun.com!news2me.EBay.Sun.COM!jethro.Corp.Sun.COM!concord!dcmyers From: dcmyers@concord.corp.sun.com (David Myers) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Cryptographic File System and FreeBSD Date: 9 Sep 1996 15:20:40 GMT Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc. Lines: 32 Distribution: world Message-ID: <511ck8$n1h@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM> References: <19960909011048.aaaa0028O@babyblue.cs.yale.edu> Reply-To: dcmyers@concord.corp.sun.com NNTP-Posting-Host: concord.corp.sun.com Valgamon <valgamon@nether.net> writes: > > I plan to install FreeBSD within the next week or so, and before I >start customizing the system too much, I would really like to install a >Cryptographic File System. Would CFS by AT&T Research be the ideal choice, >or is there something better, something more suited to FreeBSD specifically? >Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated (please reply via >email). Thanks in advance. I've been playing with CFS for a few months now. In general, it works well, although a couple of times my CFS directories got slightly corrupted (usually fixable by backing up and restoring). I'm not aware of anything better under UNIX... Be prepared for the huge performance hit you'll take. I get only about 120 Kbytes/second disk bandwidth -- about 1/40th of the normal disk rate. To my mind, this cannot be explained as unavoidable CPU activity, since my 80MHz PowerMac can perform 128-bit IDEA encryption on the fly (much stronger than CFS's 56-bit DES encryption) at over 1 MByte/sec -- see the Mac shareware program CryptDisk if you're curious. In fact, it would be a large speed win to have the Mac do the encryption and share the encrypted directories over NFS... Development on CFS appears to be halted... Dunno why, since it could be a great and useful product. -David.