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ACNS
2004
Springer

CamouflageFS: Increasing the Effective Key Length in Cryptographic Filesystems on the Cheap

13 years 7 months ago
CamouflageFS: Increasing the Effective Key Length in Cryptographic Filesystems on the Cheap
One of the few quantitative metrics used to evaluate the security of a cryptographic file system is the key length of the encryption algorithm; larger key lengths correspond to higher resistance to brute force and other types of attacks. Since accepted cryptographic design principles dictate that larger key lengths also impose higher processing costs, increasing the security of a cryptographic file system also increases the overhead of the underlying cipher. We present a general approach to effectively extend the key length without imposing the concomitant processing overhead. Our scheme is to spread the ciphertext inside an artificially large file that is seemingly filled with random bits according to a key-driven spreading sequence. Our prototype implementation, CamouflageFS, offers improved performance relative to a cipher with a larger key-schedule, while providing the same security properties. We discuss our implementation (based on the Linux Ext2 file system) and present some pre...
Michael E. Locasto, Angelos D. Keromytis
Added 20 Aug 2010
Updated 20 Aug 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where ACNS
Authors Michael E. Locasto, Angelos D. Keromytis
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