[167] in The Cryptographic File System users list
CFS Status
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matt Blaze)
Mon Mar 13 07:59:21 2000
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To: cfs-users@research.att.com
Subject: CFS Status
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Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 07:59:53 -0500
From: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>
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Folks,
Embarrassingly, I managed to somehow delete myself from this list
some time in the last few months, so I've missed a bit of the traffic here
(fortunately, there were a just bunch of bounce messages, which I *did*
see, and which prompted me to go back and look at the archives).
As you've probably noticed, the last release of CFS was over two years ago.
I've got a bunch of updates I've been sitting on, with the hope of getting
out a minor release "any day now", with a major release to follow once
I can set aside some coding time.
CFS still works on the main Unix-like platforms, though it requires some
coaxing to compile under Linux. The code is showing its age, however;
I wrote the core of the file system almost ten years ago, and the core
of the crypto stuff eight years ago.
A lot has changed since then, although the basic interface and API remain
surprisingly sound (UDP-based NFS2 are basically OK for a local file system).
The cryptography still works; the conservative cryptographic assumptions I
originally made seem to have been good choices. But there are a number
of design decisions I made eight years ago that seem quaint today, and serve
to make the code a bit unwieldy.
Mainly, computers have gotten fast enough that doing all cryptographic
operations on file-system-sized blocks (in, e.g., CBC mode over entire
8KB blocks) no longer carries a significant latency penalty.
Also, the range of platforms that CFS needs to support has shifted; there's
code in there that dates back to a need to support MACH (which I ran on
the notebook on which I wrote the first release). Obviously, no one would
write something like this today without using configure. And so on.
So, what I want to do is a new major release, throwing away some (but by
no means all) of the old code and starting from scratch where that's needed.
I started work on this in earnest about a month ago, though there have been
a bunch of distractions that have gotten in the way. Realistically,
I expect to have a beta release of CFS2.0 out in about 4-5 weeks.
Sorry for ignoring this for so long.
-matt
