geli is a

block device In Unix-like operating systems, a device file or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files allow a ...

-layer

disk encryption Disk encryption is a technology which protects information by converting it into unreadable code that cannot be deciphered easily by unauthorized people. Disk encryption uses disk encryption software or hardware to encrypt every bit of data that ...

system written for

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, introduced in version 6.0. It uses the

GEOM GEOM is the main storage framework for the FreeBSD operating system. It is available in FreeBSD 5.0 and later releases, and provides a standardized way to access storage layers. GEOM is modular and allows for ''geom modules'' to connect to the fra ...

disk framework. It was designed and implemented by Paweł Jakub Dawidek.

Design details

geli was initially written to protect data on a user's computer in situations of physical theft of hardware, disallowing the thief access to the protected data. This has changed over time with the introduction of optional data authentication/integrity verification. geli allows the key to consist of several information components (a user entered passphrase, random bits from a file, etc.), permits multiple keys (a user key and a company key, for example) and can attach a provider with a random, one-time key. The user passphrase is strengthened with PKCS#5.

Differences from GBDE

The geli utility is different from gbde in that it offers different features and uses a different scheme for doing cryptographic work. It supports the crypto framework within FreeBSD, allowing hardware cryptographic acceleration if available, as well as supporting more cryptographic algorithms (currently AES,

Triple DES In cryptography, Triple DES (3DES or TDES), officially the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm (TDEA or Triple DEA), is a symmetric-key block cipher, which applies the DES cipher algorithm three times to each data block. The Data Encryption Standa ...

, Blowfish and

Camellia ''Camellia'' (pronounced or ) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Theaceae. They are found in eastern and southern Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan and Indonesia. There are more than 220 described species, with some controve ...

) and data authentication/integrity verification via MD5,

SHA1 In cryptography, SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a cryptographically broken but still widely used hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecim ...

, RIPEMD160,

SHA256 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compressi ...

, SHA384 or SHA512 as Hash Message Authentication Codes.

References

Disk encryption FreeBSD Software using the BSD license {{crypto-stub

Design details

Differences from GBDE

See also

References