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0 pointscraigds10y ago0 comments

You could do that, but it'd be quite inefficient.

Firstly, let's assume that directories aren't encrypted. Otherwise this would be a real PITA - just to locate /foo/bar/baz.txt you'd have to decrypt each component of 001001/011101/110101.encrypted separately.

More importantly, the decrypting software has no way to encrypt things, only decrypt them. So to read 'secret.txt' you can't just encrypt 'secret.txt' to '111000.encrypted'. Instead, you have to iterate through the entire directory listing and decrypt every single filename, until you find one that decrypts to 'secret.txt'.

Obviously this gets pretty bad with even moderately-sized directories. I assume this is why the project doesn't encrypt filenames.

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cfcef10y ago

If you're reading files rather than writing them, then you must be decrypting them and in possession of the private key, which means you are permitted access to everything; so you could cache all the decryptions. Initial reads might be more expensive to locate, but then free. Also, how many cycles could it take to decrypt the few hundred or few thousand characters that could possibly make up a full filepath?

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