On Sep 29, 2007, at 10:38 PM, Ross Boylan wrote:

I would like to encrypt my backups on disk, but am concerned that doing so relies on openssl and that may create problems down the line. Could anyone clarify if it will? What's the best thing to do (which might be
avoiding encryption)?

I realize that 100% certainty is unlikely; I'll settle for less!

Details:

I use bacula on Debian, and it has disabled openssl support because of
licensing problems (e.g., thread beginning
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/07/msg00144.html, also the
"catch-22 thread" on this list in June). I am interested in encrypting
backups.  I don't actually care about encrypting communication on the
wire, but from what I can tell either feature uses openssl.

Does on-disk encryption depend on openssl?

No -- it uses portable DER-encoded ASN.1 format, with RSA and AES encryption. It should be possible (and indeed, such was the intent) to decrypt these backups with any full-featured crypto library.

Apparently some people have been working on getting bacula to work with GNUTLS, but Kern's plan is to relicense the sources so they can continue
to work with openssl.  (I'm a little surprised the latter is possible
given that FSF is administering? holding? the license.). But it sounds
as if a transition to TLS is possible, maybe done by downstream
packagers (e.g., Debian).

As I understand it, Kern removed all third party GPL'd code, and has (or will be) re-licensing it to allow linking against OpenSSL, thus negating the licensing issue.

-landonf

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