Input Needed ext3: root and encryption

Robert M. Riches Jr.

There are encrypted keys stored on disk that authenticate the mount operation and user access. During mount a pbuttphrase must be entered then another pbuttphrase for the root user.

Group access is handled by storing group keys that only authenticated users can decrypt -- using a combined "mount" and "user" key. There is a special group to handle "other" access.

This is one of the issues and the solution may not be appealing to the Linux community. System files can be marked

chown and chmod calls will be modified to invoke the encryption functions. If there is no userID -- a special "limbo" key will do the encryption until the file is finally "chowned" -- which will encrypt it with a different key.

The final solution to this is not yet defined, but it is fairly simple to allow a "null" key to backup the encrypted files, but to access them later the key's file needs stored on the backup.

Out of scope, for now. But is the kernel is compiled with these extensions it is very possible.

If root belongs to the group in the encryption key file.

Thank you for the questions, several of them are why I'm leaning toward letting root have open access to all files, but requiring root to authenticate. The issue is that I proposed that the concept of "data ownership" is maintained in the implementation, but data is only owned by a user at root's discretion in Unix.