ZFS Native Encryption by Tom Caputi
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended whenever ZFS encryption comes up as the authoritative explanation of how it was added and its trade-offs at scale.
What it is
Tom Caputi presents the design of native encryption for ZFS at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, including design decisions and how authentication uses checksum fields.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dchest · 2017-05 · on “TFS: A file system built for performance, space efficiency, and scalability”
On the contrary, it makes it suitable for file systems! File systems are not block devices, they are data structures on top of block devices — it's the job of these data structures to keep stuff, such as data, inodes, and... keys, and IVs, and MACs, checksums, etc. TFS uses Speck in XEX mode (edit: I just realized you're the author, so you already know that :). tptacek wrote a nice post about it: [LINK] and I quote: "If you’re encrypting a filesystem and not disk blocks, still don’t use XTS! Filesystems have format-awareness and flexibility. Filesystems can do a much better job of encrypting a disk than simulated hardware encryption can." Edit: check out this presentation on how encryption w
Recommends drbawb · 2022-12 · on “Apple advances user security with powerful new data protections”
The problem is that a stream cipher is going to have some per-object uniqueness (a salt, IV, etc.), so by design even if you feed it related input blocks you will get different output blocks. This is, of course, antithetical to deduplication: so you need to check/store the hash of the input before it goes through the cipher. The presentation about ZFS' native encryption[1] covers many of these sorts of trade-offs necessary to do full-disk encryption at scale. [1]: [this video]
Cites RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u · 2016-10 · on “FreeBSD 11.0 Now Available”
This is still geli+zfs, and not native zfs encryption that was recently presented in OpenZFS Developer Summit [0]. [0] [this video]
Cites zxv · 2017-03 · on “Silent Data Corruption Is Real”
Native ZFS encryption may become available soon. It is pending code review: [LINK] There was a presentation of this by Tom Caputi at the most recent OpenZFS Developer Summit. Slides: [LINK] Video: [this video] Conference: [LINK]
Cites wspeirs · 2017-06 · on “Playing with ZFS encryption on Linux”
I work with Tom at Datto. He presented all of his design decisions at the OpenZFS developer conference here: [LINK] Slides: [LINK] Video: [this video]