Transparent compression support

[Ioannis Stoilis]

This is for wishlist.

It would be nice if ecryptfs added transparent compression support.

zip support is already implemented in the kernel and all files are transparently piped to ecryptfs, so this could be added with minimum(I hope!) effort.

Not many writable filesystems support transparent compression so this could be really useful.

Keep up the good work.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Tyler, thoughts? Can you assess how doable this would be?

Seems like a good thing to me.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

This is how gpg works, btw, albeit in user space.

[Tyler Hicks (tyhicks)]

This isn't something that eCryptfs will ever do. We only want to deal with encryption and I'd really like to get it away from being a filesystem. I think transparent compression is a good idea, but should be implemented elsewhere.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Thanks, Tyler.

[paranoya (alex1452)]

Hi Tyler and Dustin,

could you be so kind as to re-consider?

Compression can only be done before encryption and would therefore be great to be included in eCryptFS. Typically eCryptFS is used to secure home directories which contain files that are well compressable (e.g. txt-files, html, doc etc.)

Compression would make a big differences with online storage like dropbox or webdav. I would be thrilled to see this feature in eCryptFS!!!

What do you think?

Take care and keep up the great work!

Regards,
Alex