[NCLUG] Encrypted Filesystems?

John L. Bass jbass at dmsd.com
Sun Apr 15 09:41:25 MDT 2007


Paul Hummer <paul at eventuallyanyway.com> writes:
> With encryption in general, you're going to see a performance decrease.
> Think about how WEP and WPA encryption effect a wireless network.  So if
> you're really wanting to encrypt the data, expect that performance hit,
> and just live with it.

As always, the devil is in the details, where performance and computers are
concerned. WEP/WPA are sometimes expensive for WiFI, and free other times,
depends if the NIC has hardware encryptions support (ditto for VPN tunnels,
where we have NIC's like the Intel with hardware supported encryption).

Ditto for filesystems, where there is either an encyrption card in the system,
or a host adapter with built in encryption hardware. For ATA/PATA disks that
would be easy to roll your own, building a PCI host adapter based on an FPGA
which provides an encrypted data path to/from a drive array.

Or even a standalone pcmcia/cardbus/pci encryption engine ... this would be
a "piece of cake" homebrew design, as many FPGA devices exist off the shelf
mounted to cards useful for such a project.

John



More information about the NCLUG mailing list