I have several encryption-related projects that I like to advertise on this list every once in a while in hopes of attracting interested developers or testers. Since we are just beginning work on Fedora Core 4, now seemed like a good time to mention them. 1. Encrypted swap. This is a prerequisite for many different disk encryption techniques. See [1] for a good example of why this is necessary (potential shortcoming of Apple's FileVault). See Red Hat bug #127378 for some discussion about this, including a proposed patch for initscripts. The patch has not been scrutinized very much yet, so is only meant to encourage discussion at this point. 2. Encrypted root filesystem. Red Hat Bug #182479 discusses adding support for an encrypted root filesystem to Fedora. The bug contains a patch for mkinird that facilitates this. Eventually it would be nice to see support in anaconda for this, but #182479 is the first step. 3. Pam-keyring. The pam-keyring PAM module unlocks a GNOME keyring for a user using that user's login password. The idea behind pam-keyring is to make using GNOME keyrings as transparent as possible. Pam-keyring is available at http://flyn.org/projects/pam_keyring/index.html. 4. Command line gnome-keyring tool. GNOME bug #155681 proposes an addition to gnome-keyring. The gnome-keyringtool utility is a program that manipulates keyrings from the command line. I originally wrote gnome-keyringtool so that it could be assigned SELinux privileges and used by pam-keyring. This avoids assigning additional privileges to various login programs. 5. Automounting encrypted removable filesystems. I would like to see encrypted removable filesystems handled as transparently as other removable media. Red Hat bug #133461 discusses this a bit. I have done some experimentation with this and have a prototype working. However, my work contains a large kludge to get HAL to acknowledge dm-crypt filesystems properly. Documentation of this shortcoming may be found at http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/hal/2004-September/001051.html and http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109937418210973&w=2. [1] Archive of bugtraq mailing list message: http://securityfocus.com/archive/1/367116/2004-06-24/2004-06-30/0 Date: 06/25/2004 Subject: Mac OS X stores login/Keychain/FileVault passwords on disk Author: Matt Johnston -- Mike :wq
