cryptmount is a software tool for managing encrypted file system

File system

A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

s under the GNU/Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 family of operating systems. It uses the device mapper

Device mapper

In the Linux kernel, the device-mapper serves as a generic framework to map one block device onto another. It forms the foundation of LVM2 and EVMS, software RAIDs, dm-crypt disk encryption, and offers additional features such as file-system snapshots....

 and dm-crypt

Dm-crypt

dm-crypt is a transparent disk encryption subsystem in Linux kernel versions 2.6 and later and in DragonFly BSD. It is part of the device mapper infrastructure, and uses cryptographic routines from the kernel's Crypto API...

 infrastructure to provide transparent encryption of file systems stored in disk partitions or within ordinary files.

Features

The main features of cryptmount include:
An interactive setup script is supplied to allow basic, but effective, encrypted file systems to be created.
Filesystems can be (un)mounted

Mount (computing)

Mounting takes place before a computer can use any kind of storage device . The user or their operating system must make it accessible through the computer's file system. A user can access only files on mounted media.- Mount point :A mount point is a physical location in the partition used as a...

 whenever needed by ordinary users, without requiring superuser/administrator

Superuser

On many computer operating systems, the superuser is a special user account used for system administration. Depending on the operating system, the actual name of this account might be: root, administrator or supervisor....

 privileges.
Multiple encrypted filesystems can be stored within a single disk partition and Encrypted swap

Paging

In computer operating systems, paging is one of the memory-management schemes by which a computer can store and retrieve data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In the paging memory-management scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called...

 partitions are supported, and can be configured automatically on system boot-up.
Configuration information about encrypted filesystems is stored within a free-format human-readable

Human-readable

A human-readable medium or human-readable format is a representation of data or information that can be naturally read by humans.In computing, human-readable data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than presented in a binary representation...

 file.
Access keys can be protected by a wide range of encryption and hashing algorithms provided by the libgcrypt

Libgcrypt

libgcrypt is a cryptographic library developed as a separated module of GnuPG . It can also be used independently of GnuPG, although it requires its error-reporting library....

 library
and can be compatible with the OpenSSL

OpenSSL

OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. The core library implements the basic cryptographic functions and provides various utility functions...

 command-line tool, and be stored & backed-up separately from the filesystem that they protect.

External links

• Official website
• cryptmount on SourceForge.net
  SourceForge.net
  SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. The website runs a version of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, forked from the last open-source version available...