Recently I’ve been working on desktop integration with ecryptfs. Dustin Kirkland has done some awesome work enabling encrypted Private directories, as well as entirely encrypted Home directories, and I want to bring a UI to that goodness for the Karmic desktop.
UbuntuOne displays a banner at the top of its shares, and this inspired me to borrow the code for use with encrypted Private directories. After a bunch of hacking and debugging, I finally got something to show up:
Pretty exciting! There is much work to be done behind the scenes but this is an encouraging start. After I get this working I plan on making a UI for installing ecryptfs-utils (the necessary package), setting up an encrypted Private directory, and managing/configuring one (or an encrypted Home). This UI would perhaps be available from System -> Administration -> Encrypted Directories, and would allow a user to have a directory of encrypted files available in a few clicks, which is mounted/unmounted transparently at login/logout.
What do you think? Are you currently using an encrypted Home or Private directory? Would you be more likely to if there was a UI to set it up? Please share your thoughts and comments :) I’ll be at UDS and can schedule a session on this if there is interest, as well.
UbuntuOne displays a banner at the top of its shares, and this inspired me to borrow the code for use with encrypted Private directories. After a bunch of hacking and debugging, I finally got something to show up:
Pretty exciting! There is much work to be done behind the scenes but this is an encouraging start. After I get this working I plan on making a UI for installing ecryptfs-utils (the necessary package), setting up an encrypted Private directory, and managing/configuring one (or an encrypted Home). This UI would perhaps be available from System -> Administration -> Encrypted Directories, and would allow a user to have a directory of encrypted files available in a few clicks, which is mounted/unmounted transparently at login/logout.
What do you think? Are you currently using an encrypted Home or Private directory? Would you be more likely to if there was a UI to set it up? Please share your thoughts and comments :) I’ll be at UDS and can schedule a session on this if there is interest, as well.
As far as seahorse I haven’t heard anything (I think I contacted them but am not sure), but I’ll hopefully meet someone involved in that project at UDS and discuss it with them. Perhaps I’ll end up putting an “Encrypted Directories” tab in that utility which allows the installation of ecryptfs-utils and from there allows you to launch the ecryptfs UI. I don’t think embedding a whole UI devoted entirely to ecryptfs makes that much sense in seahorse.
nautilus intergration looks very cool!
As for the menu approach, i strongly believe that you should talk/work in collaboration with upstream (seahorse?) before implementing yet another system-> administration menu item. Encryption and keyrings is the right way to go IMHO…
Looking forward to have this in karmic!
Gourgi
All the closed-source UbuntuOne server software has produced in the same timeframe is controversy in the community!
Go open source!
Things like:
* How do I know some “minor” corruption won’t end up locking me out of all my data?
meastp, for 2-factor encryption with a USB stick I'll point you to Dustin's post on how to do exactly what you say! http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/03/ubuntu-encrypted-home-with-2-factor.html
wiflye81, the theme is shiki-colors (wise) available on gnome-look and potentially will be added to the community themes package in Karmic.
Jim, I am not doing any graphical work for other desktop environments but I have created a python API for ecryptfs and a generic controller for my UI which other DEs can leverage to implement their equivalent quite easily. I'll probably be talking about this at UDS.
Philipp, filename encryption is supported since Jaunty and is the default, though you can specify to not encrypt filenames if you like.
Andrew, System -> Preferences does make sense in some ways, and ideally it would be a tab in the Encryption and Keyrings entry there, although that application is done in C++ and Glade, neither of which I am familiar with so I am not sure it will end up there. I suggested Administration simply because it is a somewhat advanced feature, and will lead to data loss if you forget your password. Though ideally this risk can be mitigated with the proper prompts to record your encryption passphrase.
Reason being - I need to share an encrypted local space with Windows machines on the same network (& a MacBook possible soon …). I can (and have for some time) do this with TrueCrypt, although with less desktop integration.
So my ideal would be integrated AND Truecrypt compatible.
Thanks for doing this work. :) If possible, would any of this desktop integration be available for Kubuntu or Xubuntu?
Per this bug ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ecryptfs/+bug/365796 ), the ecryptfs functionality was a bit less fleshed-out in Ubuntu’s non-GNOME distros for Jaunty, so it would be good to include Kubuntu and Xubuntu folks on this.
Thanks again!
Jim
Is this the official new theme for karmic (green looks good for koala and eucalyptus ;)) ?
Fantastic work :-)
Love to see it in Karmic
Best of luck!
Anyway, I’m very grateful for your work on this, as the only thing holding me back from using an encrypted directory is a) not knowing how without a gui and b) just wanting to know it’s stable first.
Given a little time, b. will take care of itself, so I’m very happy to see work on a nice gui!
Thank you!
I used encrypted fs a couple of cycles ago, but it was a hassle to have to type the password on start up. Since I am using a laptop, I would like to encrypt at least some of my data, in case of theft etc. This solution will make a breeze, it seems! :)
Could you perhaps consider a feature for two-phase security (e.g passphrase-thing on a usb-pen ) on login / unlock ?
Kind of EncFSVault wich replaces Apple’s FileVault with good encryption.
Hope to see this soon