Encrypt filesystems with EncFS and Loop-AES
Encrypted filesystems may be overkill for family photos or your résumé, but they make sense for network-accessible servers that hold sensitive business documents, databases that contain credit-card information, offline backups, and laptops. EncFS and Loop-AES, which are both released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), are two approaches to encrypting Linux filesystems. I'll compare the two and then look at other alternatives.
EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in userspace and runs without any special permissions. In fact, it's not so much a filesystem as a program that translates requests (encrypting or decrypting them as appropriate) and passes them to the underlying filesystem. It uses the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) library and kernel module to provide the filesystem interface, and it uses a pass-through filesystem as opposed to an encrypted block device.
I next tried Loop-AES. Loop devices are block devices that don't store any data directly, but rather redirect all reads and writes to an underlying block device or file, possibly encrypting or decrypting data in the process. I chose to write to a file rather than a partition, so you need to modify my Look-AES example slightly if you want to encrypt an entire partition.
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