linux-kernel - Re: ecryptfs is unmaintained and untested

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Message-ID: <20251014143916.GA569133@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2025 10:39:16 -0400
From: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>
To: John Stultz <jstultz@...gle.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>, Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...nel.org>, Tyler Hicks <code@...icks.com>,
        Damien Le Moal <damien.lemoal@...nsource.wdc.com>,
        ecryptfs@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ecryptfs is unmaintained and untested

On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 11:07:56PM -0700, John Stultz wrote:
> 
> Yeah. Sadly I'm one, as I needed something to migrate off of when
> encfs was deprecated.
> 
> Is there another soon-to-be-deprecated filesystem to encrypt
> directories I should move to? :)

Well, the closest way of encrypting directories is fscrypt.  The good
news is that it works on top of btrfs, ext4, f2fs, and ubifs, and it's
not likely to be deprecated given that it is used by chromeos and
android.  The bad news is that the integration with traditional Linux
desktop setups (e.g., login, etc.) was never completed.

This is probably because for many desktop and server configurations,
using dm-crypt is actually better suited and more secure.  It
certainly doesn't solve the "just encrypt a directory hierarchy in a
file system" and the "support multiple users' who might have different
encryption keys and which are mutually suspicious" use cases.  But
this appears to not be sufficiently interesting for distributions to
do that integration work.

					- Ted