Yesterday, I wrote about the ZFS Encrypted Backup to S3 project that I started over at Project Kenai. This project integrates with the ZFS Automatic Snapshot service to provide a way for automatically storing encrypted ZFS snapshots into the Cloud.

So, what if you wanted to just store and retrieve individual files? Well, there is a tool to help fill this need as well! The Crypto Front End to S3 CLIs project offers a couple tools that allow you to encrypt and upload files to the Cloud (and of course download and decrypt files as well). This project provides a very simple to use interface in the form of the Cloud Safety Box, a tool that leverages a number of pre-configured default settings to trade-off flexibility for ease of use. For those wanting more control over the settings (including encryption provider, encryption algorithm, key type and other settings), simply use the s3-crypto.sh utility. A diagram is available showing how these tools work together.

Since these tools can be configured to use OpenSSL as their cryptography provider (and there are no further dependencies on OpenSolaris, you can actually use this tool on other operating systems (e.g., Mac OS X was successfully used during one of the tests).

It should be noted that the s3-crypto.sh utility can be used to download and decrypt an ZFS snapshot uploaded to the Cloud using the ZFS Encrypted Backup to S3 utility so that with these two tools you have a way of storing and retrieving regular files as well as ZFS snapshots.

You can find all of the details, documentation and download instructions (as well as a Mercurial gate) at the Crypto Front End to S3 CLIs project page. So, please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Technorati Tag: storage security encryption cloudcomputing OpenSolaris zfs

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