GoCryptFS questions and more information request

[rfjakob]

GoCryptFS questions and more information request

[pepa65]

There seems to be no man-file or other documentation, so I have similar questions.

1. see above
2. Is reverse mounting possible? Ie. mount a normal folder and come up with a fuse encrypted one?
3. see above

[rfjakob]

Testing on OSX would be wonderful!

Questions:

@dakkusingh

1. Haha, I did not see this one coming ;) No, not at the moment.
   I guess the use case is that you want to download single files from Dropbox, and with encrypted filenames you obviously cannot choose the right one.
   I will add a parameter, probably --plaintextnames, to enable this.

2. Yes. Every file is independent.

3. Is planned, but there is no parameter yet. For now, you can use a symlink to achieve the effect. (store the gocryptfs.conf somewhere else, place a symlink in the encrypted directory).

4. I did not know about cryptomator until now. The crypto indeed looks similar.
   The main difference I see right now is that cryptomator uses WebDAV while gocryptfs uses FUSE to provide access to the decrypted files.
   This means that cryptomator works on Windows (no FUSE available) but also that it will be a lot slower than gocryptfs.

@pepa65
The command-line parameter are documented in the help text only at the moment, I have added that to the repo at https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs/blob/master/USAGE.txt

2. No, and this is not planned at the moment. The thing is, AES-GCM (the encryption mode that gocryptfs uses) needs a random value for each block. For forward encryption, this random value is stored on disk inside the encrypted files. For reverse mode, there is no place to store that value.

[pepa65]

@2 Thanks for replying and for adding the USAGE.txt. I see about gocryptfs being non-reversable... Love the "reverse" feature, but don't like the security issues of encfs.

[pepa65]

While we're asking questions, because it's Go, could it be made to run on Windows as well? (Cross-platform support is an attractive feature.)

[rfjakob]

The problem with windows is that it does not have FUSE support. Linux has it built-in and Mac has the OSXFuse project. On windows, the only thing i am aware of is http://encfsmp.sourceforge.net/ . They SOMEHOW managed to get encfs (which also uses FUSE) running on windows, using a closed-source windows kernel driver and lots of black magic.

[dakkusingh]

Thanks rfjakob for the prompt responses. I am going to create a few standalone issues for the requests above so we can track these better..

[rfjakob]

Thanks @dakkusingh for creating the tickets. I am replying to them individually and closing this one.