Linux-Voice-Issue-001

GROUP TEST ENCRYPTION
Performance
Do they add much overhead?
Mounting volumes
Working with the encrypted containers.
AES is the fastest cipher, with Blowfish just behind. Twofish is
relatively slower, and Serpent is the slowest.
TrueCrypt supports parallelised encryption for multicore
systems. This means that it can use all the cores in a
multicore processor in parallel to encrypt and decrypt the
data. Furthermore, header key derivation is also parallelised, which
means TrueCrypt can also mount volumes faster. However, one
performance enhancing feature in TrueCrypt, pipelined read/write
operations, is only available on the Windows version of the tool.
The Quad-Core AMD A8 processor on one of our test machines
supports hardware-accelerated encryption, and thanks to this
instruction set, which makes the encryption/decryption several
times faster than when performed on a purely software
implementation. TrueCrypt isn’t the only app to take advantage of
hardware acceleration. So too can eCryptfs and BestCrypt.
However, we couldn’t find the option to control the state of the AES
hardware acceleration, either in the graphical front-end or the CLI
version. There’s no information on whether zuluCrypt uses
hardware acceleration but cryptsetup does support it.
FUSE boost
Since EncFS ties in to the Filesystem in User-Space kernel (FUSE)
module, you should expect some drop in performance when using
it. For the same reasons the authors of eCryptFS claim their tool is
faster than EncFS because there is no overhead caused by context
switching between the kernel and userspace. Many tools have a
benchmarking tool built into them to help you compare the
performance of the various ciphers for your setup. Some tools,
such as BestCrypt, measure performance by averaging the time it
takes to encrypt small amounts of data several times, while others
let you specify the size of the buffer you wish to encrypt.
In our tests, TrueCrypt was the fastest, writing over a gigabyte of
files in under a minute. eCryptfs was marginally slower while
BestCrypt took over three minutes and was the slowest of the lot.
EncFS, despite its userspace disadvantage, repeatedly edged out
zuluCrypt sometimes by as much as 20 seconds.
VERDICT
TrueCrypt
BestCrypt
zuluCrypt
eCryptfs
EncFS
eCryptfs bundles a script that can use cryptsetup to encrypt the swap
partition, as well as the more usual dasa partitions, such as /home.
To mount an encrypted volume you provide the correct
password and/or keyfile. Once mounted, an encrypted
volume behaves like any other disk. You can even play or
record multimedia content, like a video from a mounted encrypted
volume – the app will load bits of the video and decrypt it in RAM.
The biggest advantage with both eCryptfs and EncFS is that
they can be used to protect existing filesystems without block
device access, such as Samba shares or cloud storage folders.
They also allow offline file-based backups of encrypted files.
eCryptfs has its own set of scripts to mount and unmount
encrypted directories. eCryptfs also has utilities that can mount
the encrypted directories from an Ubuntu live CD to help you
recover data.
EncFS also has its own CLI tool to mount encrypted folders. Like
eCryptfs it also needs two directories -- one to hold encrypted data
and the other to hold unencrypted data.
You can mount BestCrypt and TrueCrypt encrypted volumes
from the graphical interface as well as the CLI. The graphical
interfaces of both tools enable the user to mount the volumes as
read-only. BestCrypt additionally lets you specify a mount point for
the container.
More Zulu excellence
But both are topped by zuluCrypt, which includes the zuluMount
tool. This is a general-purpose mounting tool that can mount all
encrypted volumes supported by zuluCrypt, including LUKS and
TrueCrypt volumes. You can also mount volumes from the main
zuluCrypt app, but zuluMount has a simpler interface and is
designed with the sole purpose of mounting and unmounting
filesystems. In fact zuluMount can mount and unmount
unencrypted volumes as well and can even manage plugged-in
devices. Like zuluCrypt, the zuluMount tool has a CLI interface as
well. zuluMount also lets you make a mount point public and share
it with other users.
VERDICT
TrueCrypt
BestCrypt
zuluCrypt
eCryptfs
EncFS
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