CryFS
CryFS encrypts your files, so you can safely store them anywhere. It works well together with cloud services like Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive and others. See https://www.cryfs.org.
Install latest release
Linux
This only works for Ubuntu 17.04 and later, and Debian Stretch and later. You can also use CryFS on older versions of these distributions by following the Building from source instructions below.
sudo apt install cryfs
The following should work on Arch and Arch-based distros:
sudo pacman -S cryfs
If you use homebrew-core, using the following instruction you should be able to install CrysFS:
brew install cryfs/tap/cryfs
Additionally, the following would work for any Linux distro with the Nix package manager:
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.cryfs
OSX
CryFS is distributed via Homebrew, MacPorts, and Nix.
If you use Homebrew:
brew install --cask macfuse
brew install cryfs/tap/cryfs
If you use MacPorts (only available for OSX 10.12 to 10.14 at the moment):
port install cryfs
For Nix, the macOS build for cryfs is available in the Nixpkgs channel 21.05 and later:
brew install --cask macfuse # or download from https://osxfuse.github.io/
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.cryfs
Windows (experimental)
CryFS has experimental Windows support since the 0.10 release series. To install it, do:
- Install DokanY
- Install Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2019
- Install CryFS
GUI
There are some GUI applications with CryFS support. You usually have to install the GUI and also CryFS itself for it to work.
- SiriKali
- Plasma Vault in KDE Plasma >= 5.11
Stability / Production readiness
CryFS 0.10 or later is stable for most use cases, but has a couple of known issues that can corrupt your file system. They don't happen in normal day to day use, but can happen if you don't pay attention or aren't aware of them. This is why the version number hasn't reached 1.0 yet.
- If you kill the CryFS process while it was in the middle of writing data (either intentionally or unintentionally by losing power to your PC), your file system could get corrupted.
CryFS does not do journaling. Note that in 0.10.x, read accesses into a CryFS file system can cause writes because file timestamps get updated. So if you're unlucky, your file system
could get corrupted if you lose power while you were reading files as well. Read accesses aren't an issue in CryFS 0.11.x anymore, because it mounts the filesystem with
noatimeby default. - The same corruption mentioned above can happen when CryFS is trying to write data but your disk ran out of space, causing the write to fail.
- CryFS does not currently support concurrent access, i.e. accessing a file system from multiple devices at the same time. CryFS works very well for storing data in a cloud and using it from multiple devices, but you need to make sure that only one CryFS process is active at any point in time, and you also need to make sure that the cloud synchronization client (e.g. Dropbox) finishes its synchronization before you switch devices. There are some ideas on how concurrent access could be supported in future versions, but it's a hard problem to solve. If you do happen to access the file system from multiple devices at the same time, it will likely go well most of the time, but it can corrupt your file system.
- In addition to the scenarios above that can corrupt your file system, note that there is currently no fsck-like tool for CryFS that could recover your data. Although such a tool is in theory, possible, it hasn't been implemented yet and a corrupted file system will most likely cause a loss of your data.
If the scenarios mentioned above don't apply to you, then you can consider CryFS 0.10.x as stable. The 0.9.x versions are not recommended anymore.
Building from source
Requirements
- Git (for getting the source code)
- GCC version >= 7 or Clang >= 7
- CMake version >= 3.10
- pkg-config (on Unix)
- Conan package manager
- libcurl4 (including development headers)
- SSL development libraries (including development headers, e.g. libssl-dev)
- libFUSE version >= 2.8.6 (including development headers), on Mac OS X instead install macFUSE from https://osxfuse.github.io/
- Python >= 3.5
- OpenMP
You can use the following commands to install these requirements
# Ubuntu
$ sudo apt install git g++ cmake make pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libfuse-dev python python3-pip
$ sudo pip3 install conan
# Fedora
$ sudo dnf install git gcc-c++ cmake make pkgconf libcurl-devel openssl-devel fuse-devel python python3-pip
$ sudo pip3 install conan
# Macintosh
$ brew install cmake pkg-config openssl libomp macfuse
$ sudo pip3 install conan
Build & Install
-
Clone repository
$ git clone https://github.com/cryfs/cryfs.git cryfs $ cd cryfs -
Build
$ mkdir cmake && cd cmake $ cmake .. $ make -
Install
$ sudo make install
You can pass the following variables to the cmake command (using -Dvariablename=value):
- -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Release|Debug]: Whether to run code optimization or add debug symbols. Default: Release
- -DBUILD_TESTING=[on|off]: Whether to build the test cases (can take a long time). Default: off
- -DCRYFS_UPDATE_CHECKS=off: Build a CryFS that doesn't check online for updates and security vulnerabilities.
Building on Windows (experimental)
Build with Visual Studio 2019 and pass in the following flags to CMake:
-DDOKAN_PATH=[dokan library location, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Dokan\DokanLibrary-1.2.1"]
If you set these variables correctly in the CMakeSettings.json file, you should be able to open the cryfs source folder with Visual Studio 2019.
Troubleshooting
On most systems, CMake should find the libraries automatically. However, that doesn't always work.
-
Fuse library not found
Pass in the library path with
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/path-to-fuse-or-macFUSE/lib/pkgconfig cmake .. -
Fuse headers not found
Pass in the include path with
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/path-to-fuse-or-macFUSE/lib/pkgconfig cmake .. -
Openssl headers not found
Pass in the include path with
cmake .. -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-I/path/to/openssl/include" -
OpenMP not found (osx)
Either build it without OpenMP
cmake .. -DDISABLE_OPENMP=onbut this will cause slower file system mount times (performance after mounting will be unaffected). If you installed OpenMP with homebrew or macports, it will be autodetected. If that doesn't work for some reason (or you want to use a different installation than the autodetected one), pass in these flags:
cmake .. -DOpenMP_CXX_FLAGS='-Xpreprocessor -fopenmp -I/path/to/openmp/include' -DOpenMP_CXX_LIB_NAMES=omp -DOpenMP_omp_LIBRARY=/path/to/libomp.dylib
Using local dependencies
Starting with CryFS 0.11, Conan is used for dependency management. When you build CryFS, Conan downloads the exact version of each dependency library that was also used for development. All dependencies are linked statically, so there should be no incompatibility with locally installed libraries. This is the recommended way because it has the highest probability of working correctly.
However, some distributions prefer software packages to be built against dependencies dynamically and against locally installed versions of libraries. So if you're building a package for such a distribution, you have the option of doing that, at the cost of potential incompatibilities. If you follow this workflow, please make sure to extensively test your build of CryFS. You're using a setup that wasn't tested by the CryFS developers.
To use local dependencies, you need to tell the CryFS build how to get these dependencies.
You can do this by writing a small CMake configuration file and passing it to the CryFS build using -DDEPENDENCY_CONFIG=filename.
This configuration file needs to define a cmake target for each of the dependencies.
Here's an example config file that gets the dependencies from conan. And here's another example config file that works for getting dependencies that are locally installed in Ubuntu. You can create your own configuration file to tell the build how to get its dependencies and, for example, mix and match. Get some dependencies from Conan and others from the local system.
Creating .deb and .rpm packages
It is recommended to install CryFS using packages, because that allows for an easy way to uninstall it again once you don't need it anymore.
If you want to create a .rpm package, you need to install rpmbuild.
-
Clone repository
$ git clone https://github.com/cryfs/cryfs.git cryfs $ cd cryfs -
Build
$ mkdir cmake && cd cmake $ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DBUILD_TESTING=off $ make package
Disclaimer
In the event of a password leak, you are strongly advised to create a new filesystem and copy all the data over from the previous one. Then, remove all copies of the compromised filesystem and config file(e.g, from the "previous versions" feature of your cloud system) to prevent access to the key (and, as a result, your data) using the leaked password.