Design and Implementation of a Forced Encryption Kernel Module

Access control mechanisms such as access control lists (ACLs)are often used against divulging of sensitive information. However, when this is implemented as apart of a kernel, if someone stole the storage media, he can easily avoid the access control mechanisms. To complement the defect of the access control mechanisms, we designed and implemented an LKM that applies forced encryption to the data that is transmitted to an external storage media. Advantages of our LKM-based approach include fast encryption in kernel space, easy activation/deactivation of the functionality and the possibility to easily share encrypted files within an authorized group.