Unmaintained?

The EncFS version 1.7.4 available with all the major distributions is now more than three years old. Although no newer versions have been released, maintainer Valient Gough does continuously update the source code of EncFS in the Subversion repository [5]. When asked, Gough confirmed the arrival of a new 1.7.5 version of EncFS soon, but it will only contain minor bugfixes and, particularly for Linux users, introduce hardly noticeable changes.

In the meantime, however, work on the next major version is in full swing. EncFS 2.0 will include many improvements under the hood, such as moving the build system to cmake and introducing unit tests. In the future, it also will be possible to use other security back ends besides OpenSSL.

Additional Software

A number of additional programs related to EncFS simplify the task of managing encrypted directories, thanks to a graphical user interface, or better integrate EncFS into the system. For example, Cryptkeeper [6], which is a system tray applet (Figure 3), provides the main functions of EncFS.

Figure 3: The Cryptkeeper system tray applet helps you manage EncFS volumes.

The simple KDE application KEncFS [7] can integrate and unmount EncFS directories (Figure 4). However, it does not seem to be under active development currently and thus has been missing from the repositories of almost all distributions for some time. If you still want to use the tool, you will need to compile it from the source code.

Figure 4: Although the KEncFS graphical interface does a good job in principle, it has not been under active development for a long time and is only available as source code.

Gnome EncFS Manager [8] is another program with a tray applet for managing EncFS under Gnome (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The Gnome EncFS Manager provides a rich graphical interface for the Gnome desktop.

This tool also attempts to automate typical processes, such as unmounting EncFS directories on logout.

A tool for PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module), called pam-encfs [9], allows you to mount an EncFS directory automatically at login, saving you the bother of entering a password – at the expense of security. The password used to encrypt a directory with EncFS must be the same as the system login password.

A better alternative to pam-encfs exists for Gnome users at least: gnome-encfs [10] stores EncFS passwords in the Gnome keyring and thus (optionally) lets you mount EncFS directories at login.

Future

EncFS is available not only for Linux but for Windows and Mac OS X, too. Thus, it is no trouble to exchange encrypted data across operating system boundaries. You can encrypt, say, your Dropbox folder or a directory on your external hard drive using EncFS and still use it on another platform.

The encfs4win [11] project supports the use of EncFS under Windows. To install the encryption software on Mac OS X, you need the homebrew package manager (brew install encfs). Apple fans also have the option of using EncFSVault [12] to replace the original Apple FileVault.