Okay...so I missed some documentation. Documentation/crypto/faq.txt helped get blowfish working. And I found the error doucmented in the last chapter (the FAQ) of the howto at EncryptionHOWTO.sourceforge.net. So the revised question is: Out of curiousity, what non trivial work needs to be done to losetup to add a cipher (e.g. twofish or aes)? Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/