DM-INLINECRYPT Being Worked On To Leverage Inline Block Device Encryption

[Gonk]

What confuses me is that Self-Encrypting Drives (storage devices with hardware-based encryption) already exist; the only instance not already covered by SED would be block-level writes over an untrusted network.

I have never looked into this; can one do software raid over multiple SEDs? Including actions like hot adding and removing drives?

[ATLief]

I'm wondering what the use-case is for this.

There's a description here:

https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/projects/cryptographic-module-validation-program/documents/security-policies/140sp3124.pdf

As far as I can see, it allows for FIPS 140-2 compliance without needing to validate encryption software running on the 'host' cpu. Since validation of such software is lengthy and expensive, it means you don't have to rerun the validation process as often; which is probably a good thing.

I could be wrong - this is not my area of expertise. Anyone care to comment?

I think performance would also be better for certain workloads. What confuses me is that Self-Encrypting Drives (storage devices with hardware-based encryption) already exist; the only instance not already covered by SED would be block-level writes over an untrusted network. In that case, the network would bottleneck you long before software-based encryption could.

[Old Grouch]

I'm wondering what the use-case is for this.

There's a description here:

https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/projects/cryptographic-module-validation-program/documents/security-policies/140sp3124.pdf

As far as I can see, it allows for FIPS 140-2 compliance without needing to validate encryption software running on the 'host' cpu. Since validation of such software is lengthy and expensive, it means you don't have to rerun the validation process as often; which is probably a good thing.

I could be wrong - this is not my area of expertise. Anyone care to comment?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DM-INLINECRYPT Being Worked On To Leverage Inline Block Device Encryption

In addition to Eric Biggers of Google being busy working on various crypto and hashing performance optimizations, the longtime Linux developer has also been working on "dm-inlinecrypt" for better leveraging inline block device encryption...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/DM-INLINECRYPT-Patches