As security becomes a greater focus in networks, every aspect of online information needs a level of protection from the network-level use of firewalls and IDS to the host-level use of IDS. However, an additional level of security has recently come to the forefront of security - cryptographic filesystems.

While the technology for cryptographic filesystems has been available for quite a while, the deployment of cryptographic filesystems in production environments has not taken hold.

This article will discuss some of the background and technology of cryptographic filesystems and will then cover some example implementations of these filesystems including Microsoft's Encrypting File System for Windows 2000, the Linux CryptoAPI, and the Secure File System.

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