Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey? [LWN.net]

Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey?

Posted Jul 29, 2004 7:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Cryptoloop does the hokey-cokey? by tgb
Parent article: Another look at the new development model

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?

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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.