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Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey?

Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey?

Posted Jul 29, 2004 6:58 UTC (Thu) by tgb (guest, #745)
Parent article: Another look at the new development model

Consider some of the changes which have been merged since 2.6.0:

  • ...
  • Cryptoloop
  • ...

...

The first features to be removed by this path are likely to be devfs and cryptoloop.

Pardon my ignorance, but why is cryptoloop, which appears to be a relatively new feature, being pulled already?


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Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey?

Posted Jul 29, 2004 7:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Cryptoloop *in the device mapper* is new.

Encrypted loopback devices (implemented by cryptoloop outside the device mapper) are very old: I remember them from the 2.0 days, and they may predate that.

One question: if cryptoloop is going away, what's replacing it? Is the CryptoAPI there for no reason, or is there some new magical way to encrypt filesystems that I've overlooked?

Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey?

Posted Jul 29, 2004 9:37 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

As I understand it, the replacement is dm-crypt: doing cryptography through DM.

The old cryptoloop support is allegedly "buggy, unmaintained, and reportedly has mutliple [sic] security weaknesses," and the kernel crew feel that vulnerable encrypted filesystem support is worse than no support at all: at least if there's no support, people know their data is vulnerable...

James.

Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey?

Posted Jul 29, 2004 22:23 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

You can use DM to encrypt a device and loopback block driver to create the
device from a file. So you end up using two tools instead of one but it
works.

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