Comment 47 for bug 1718658

#34 said:
This bug affects a cryptographic (read: highly sensitive) feature, is 15 months old, a patch was proposed 12 months ago, but it is still of "Undecided" importance and still "Unassigned"? Come on! Are the ecryptfs-utils and systemd packages unmaintained at Ubuntu?

Well, this bug is now over TWO YEARS old, and is still broken in 19.10.

Expecting the systemd devs to care is, frankly, naive. I would have expected Canonical to at least do SOMETHING by now, even if it was just to add the keyctl hack to .profile, but that still leaves a ton of problems like non-root users never being unable to unmount their encrypted data - especially when you add in the OTHER systemd bugs that cause it to stay mounted and unencrypted even after logout.

The problem here is that Kirkland was the one who was hot for ecryptfs, and he left Canonical a long time ago. While he may technically still be listed as the maintainer of the package, he clearly gives 0 f**ks about it. (He was still on Ubuntu staff when this bug first surfaced, and didn't even care THEN when it was literally (part of) his job, so it's no surprise he still doesn't now).

The package needs to be demoted out of the repos, and the default behavior for encrypted /home changed to use something else - anything else, really - if it hasn't been already. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is just warn people not to use it, because at 2 years and counting I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to ever get sorted out...

TLDR: use the keyctl hack from #26 to get your data back, then get the hell off ecryptfs as fast as possible.