
The TCFS Project

Aniello Del Sorbo, anidel@mikonos.dia.unisa.it
v0.0, Fri Feb 19 10:16:13 MET 1999

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What's TCFS
3. What's done
4. What we want to do
5. Who can help


1. Introduction

This document is a brief introduction to TCFS describing how it works in
general and what we planned to expand it.

This is not intended to either describe the TCFS internals or to explain how
to use it.

We only want to provide a general overview of TCFS.

2. What's TCFS

TCFS stands for Transparent Cryptographic File System. It's a new crptographic
network filesystem for Linux (kernel versions 2.0.x).
It's totally transparent to any user using it except when pushing or removing
the encryption/decryption key.
More infos on what it can do for you may be found here:

	ftp://tcfs.dia.unisa.it/pub/tcfs/docs/tcfs.ps.gz

3. What's done

Currently TCFS version  is 2.2.1a and it's a beta for us. This because we have
not yet implemented all the features we planned. It's more robust and fast,
provinding a high level of security thanks the use of 3DES as encryption
engine.
TCFS can encrypt user's single files as like as entire directories in a totally
transparent way (i.e. you can use your favorite application on top of it
just like a normal network filesystem as NFS without prior executing strange
commands). It only require you to push the encryption key before working on
the encrypted files.
Moreover TCFS provides support for sharing encrpyted data among users in a
group via a threshold mechanism (only a specified number of users have to push
her piece of key to access the encrypted data).
For more info on TCFS group sharing may be found here:

	http://tcfs.dia.unisa.it/group-sharing.html

4. What we want to do

Currently TCFS only works on Linux operative system. We're working on a porting
for NetBSD (then for all other BSD like OSes), but our plan it to port it on
more OSes like Microsoft Windows NT, Digital UNIX, SUN Solaris.
We are eliminating the need of a TCFS daemon (i.e. xattrd) on the server host.
The TCFS group sharing mechanism have to be extended.
Today TCFS supports group sharing on a single host, i.e. all the group users
have to be logged in the TCFS host, and this mine our interpretation of
transparency.
Our plan is to provide a mechanism so that each user in the group have only to
push her piece of key on her workstation, and then access the encrpyted data
from that using her favorite application.

5. Who can help

If you are a Linux experienced programmer or a Foo OS experienced user or
a final user, then you can help us. What you can do?
You may help us porting TCFS on a large number of different OSes, report bugs,
fix them, or simply give comments on improvement.

