Crypt4GH File System

crypt4ghfs is a read-only fuse layer exposing Crypt4GH-encrypted files, as if they were decrypted

crypt4ghfs [-f|--foreground] [--conf conf_file] <mountpoint>

The default configuration file is in ~/.c4gh/fs.conf.

See the configuration sample for examples.

• seckey must point to a Crypt4GH private key or an ED25519 ssh key. This option is required.
• rootdir must point to the root directory where the Crypt4GH-encrypted files reside. This option is required.
• when not in read-only mode, a list of recipients must be specified (potentially only including yourself), for the case of an encrypting file system.

By default, we daemonize the process. Use -f (or --foreground) to keep it in the foreground. This is useful to see the logs, since stdout/stderr are otherwise redirected to /dev/null when the process is daemonized.

Extra debug output is available if log_level=LEVEL is used (where LEVEL is a Python logging levels)

Example

Assume you have Crypt4GH-encrypted files in ~/encrypted-files, and your private key in ~/.c4gh/mykey. You can create a configuration file in ~/.c4gh/fs.conf with

[DEFAULT]
rootdir=~/encrypted-files
[CRYPT4GH]
seckey = ~/.c4gh/mykey

Create an (empty) directory, ~/clear-files and mount the Crypt4GH file system in it with:

crypt4ghfs ~/clear-files

You can now read files in ~/encrypted-files as if they were decrypted.
Instead of

crypt4gh decrypt --sk ~/.c4gh/mykey < ~/encrypted-files/example.txt.c4gh | less

you can now simply, use

cat ~/clear-files/example.txt
# or any other tool using the POSIX file abstraction

Tips: if you mount sshfs from the EGA distribution system, you can download chunk-by-chunk the files from the EGA, as Crypt4GH files, and use all of them with 2 commands: sshfs -o uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g) -f <remote-url>:. ~/encrypted-files, followed by crypt4ghfs ~/clear-files. After that, you keep your prompt and can "use" the files in ls -al ~/clear-files.

Installation

The code is written in Python (3.6+). libfuse and pyfuse3 are required. To install libfuse, you'll need cmake, meson and ninja.

On Ubuntu, run:

apt-get install ca-certificates pkg-config git gcc make automake autoconf libtool bzip2 zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libedit-dev ninja-build cmake udev libc6-dev
pip install -U pip
pip install meson pytest

Install the (latest) libfuse (v3.10) with:

git clone https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse.git
cd libfuse
git checkout fuse-3.10.0
mkdir build
cd build
meson ..
ninja
ninja install

Finally, install the python packages:

pip install crypt4ghfs
# this will install crypt4gh, trio and pyfuse3 too

For the (latest) SSHFS (v3.7), useful to test the above tips:

git clone https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs.git
cd sshfs
git checkout sshfs-3.7.0
mkdir build
cd build
meson ..
ninja
ninja install