Ubuntu – EncFs insecure, what to use now

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I love encfs as it provides file-based encrypting which is quite useful when it comes to cloud storage. But it looks like that especially for this use case, encfs is considered to be insecure. I'm aware that encfs 2 is in development but how to deal with it in the meantime? Are there any alternatives that integrate well in ubuntu?

Edit: The security issue I mostly refer to is this one. It is still present in version 1.8 and makes your files vulnerable if someone get's multiple versions of your encrypted files. If one is worried about services like Dropbox are not that thrustworthy and encrypts folders uploaded into the cloud because of that, the opportunity that the attacker (the service) gets more than one copy of the cyphertext is absolutely given.

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Best Answer

As I write this, there seem to be quite a few open source tools similar to encfs (but more "modern" than encfs) that could be able to encrypt files in a "cloud friendly" way (i.e. providing per-file encryption, keeping modification times, and so on).

Most of them are fine if you are using only Ubuntu or any other Linux system (ecryptfs seems good), but things become difficult if you require interoperability with other OSes and mobile devices, as most of us is expecting nowadays.

Just to name a few:

  • Cryptomator seems to be the only one that works "everywhere", from any GNU/Linux OS to Android. There's even a PPA for Ubuntu and binaries for several other distros and OSes.
  • ecryptfs works only on GNU/Linux systems (like Ubuntu, but also ChromeOS), and it's nice if you won't need to access your files from non-Linux OSes, but people say there may be some problems with cloud sync tools.
  • CryFS it's a young solution, works only on Linux for now, but there are plans to port it to MacOS and Windows as well. Maybe it worths some attention in the future.

You may find also interesting this comparison of tools from the CryFS website.

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