Looking back ten years: Another Cypherpunks failure (fwd)

[Jei]

And Open Source failure, I might add...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 27 Jan 2002 05:55:28 -0000
From: Dr. Evil <drevil at sidereal.kz>
To: cypherpunks at lne.com
Subject: Looking back ten years: Another Cypherpunks failure

We know that some kind of privacy-enhanced payment system has been one
of the long-time c'punk goals, probably for at least ten years.  We
know that we are probably further away from having that be a reality
than we were ten years ago.  This is excusable; the obstacles are
enormous.  You need a lot of people to use it before it's useful, and
there are all kinds of regulatory problems.  And there are a whole
list of other problems, too.

One of the other c'punk goals was encryption all over the place.
Seems reasonable, right?  This Internet thing was just starting to
take off.  Free open-source OSes like Linux were coming out.
Encryption everywhere was well within reach.

And guess what, that goal was _almost_ achieved, except in two places,
which I am calling the Great Encryption Tabboos (GETs).

GET #1 is voice encryption over phone lines.  Three years after
Starium started, and ten years after c'punks started, you still can't
buy a digital voice encryption device that has trustable crypto in
it.  This is also excusable because it encounters some of the same
problems that privacy-enhanced payments encounter, namely overcoming
network effects and dealing with regulators.

GET #2 is disk encryption.  Yes, it sounds so simple, but it is a
Great Tabboo, and this time there are no excuses.  None.  You don't
need any network effects.  Regulators in the US have little they can
do about it.  There are about half a dozen great Open Source OSes to
work on.  And yet there is nothing.

Let me refine my definition of nothing.  Yes, I am well aware of
various kludges like Loopback Crypto on Linux, and CFS and TCFS and
StegFS.  But what about just plain old ext2 FS or ffs?  After all
these years, why is it that Microsoft is shipping OSes with FS crypto
before any of the free OSes are?  As far as I know, there is not a
single distribution of Linux or *BSD that ships with a non-kludge (ie,
non-loopback) encrypted FS.

I'm defining loopback as a kludge.  Unix FSes come with all kinds of
features such as file ownership and modes which don't require loopback
to work.  Encryption isn't any different from those features and it
should also be built in to the FS, not kludged on with a loopback.
Would you think it is a kludge if you read the docs on "chmod" and it
said, "oh, if you want to use chmod you're going to have to create
this loopback fs like this..."

So, is there any hope for having an open source OS ship with a
filesystem with encryption capabilities?




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