ImgFS: a transparent cryptography for stored images using a filesystem in userspace

Real-time encryption and decryption of digital images stored on end-user devices is a challenging task due to the inherent features of the images. Traditional software encryption applications generally suffered from the expense of user convenience, performance efficiency, and the level of security provided. To overcome these limitations, the concept of transparent encryption has been proposed. This type of encryption mechanism can be implemented most efficiently with kernel file systems. However, this approach has some disadvantages since developing a new file system and attaching it in the kernel level requires a deep understanding of the kernel internal data structure. A filesystem in userspace (FUSE) can be used to bridge the gap. Nevertheless, current implementations of cryptographic FUSE-based file systems suffered from several weaknesses that make them less than ideal for deployment. This paper describes the design and implementation of ImgFS, a fully transparent cryptographic file system that resides on user space. ImgFS can provide a sophisticated way to access, manage, and monitor all encryption and key management operations for image files stored on the local disk without any interaction from the user. The development of ImgFS has managed to solve weaknesses that have been identified on cryptographic FUSE-based implementations. Experiments were carried out to measure the performance of ImgFS over image files’ read and write against the cryptographic service, and the results indicated that while ImgFS has managed to provide higher level of security and transparency, its performance was competitive with other established cryptographic FUSE-based schemes of high performance.