Re: Basic interface for key management in reiser4 (DRAFT)

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>]

On 8/18/05, Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> wrote:
> but the idea is to use keys instead of standard unix permissions....
> 
> I think you need to store keys in a per process place, and allow
> specifying whether children of a process inherit the keys somehow.

Oh, slick!

I did not previously catch what the advantage would be to using crypto
in the FS rather than just a crypted block device... minus some non
critical niceties (like being able to use a random & per file IV is
good from a security perspective.).

Now I see what is possible, and I'm really excited.

It will be interesting to see how a system with many keys performs..
most fast implementations of most crypto algs need a computationally
expensive key setup which produces a fairly large working set of
constants for encryption/decryption.

With a per process structure there should be a way to revoke all
instances of a key from all the other running processes that carry
it.. or at least all processes of a specific user. Otherwise it will
be too easy to accidental leave keys laying around.

This per process crypto in the FS fits very nicely with a lot of the
other recent security advances in the Linux world.

Thanks for something new and exciting to talk about with my Linux
using friends! :)