[Stegfs-developing] stegfs

[john <jo...@po...>]

Hello everyone,

We're not getting on very well with this stegfs thing, are we? The project
has been set up for a year, and nothing has happened.

OK, here's my idea. Feel free to tell me I'm stupid if you don't agree.

This project is just too hard. A file system like ext2 is very complicated.
Our aim is to make something even more complicated, with encryption and
so on added. The Linux developers have put a huge amount of effort into
making ext2 work well, and we don't have the time or resources to match that.
Even if we got something to work, we would always be playing catch-up: the
ext2 developers keep changing their code to improve it, so we would have
to keep changing our code to match. That's why the original version by 
Andrew McDonald is out of date and can't be used any more.

So: I suggest we try something simpler instead. We shouldn't make our
own file system.

The loopback drivers lets you make a block device out of a file (or disk
partition). Suppose we modified it so that the blocks of the block device
were spread around the file at random, instead of being in the correct order.
Then you could make a file system on top of the loopback device, and the
blocks of that file system would be randomly distributed around the original
file or partition.
Now, with a bit more work, we could make another file system that used
some of the other blocks of the original file. And then another one,
and so on. So we've got lots of different file systems all occupying
the same underlying file or partition. If everything is encrypted, then
an attacker won't be able to tell how many file systems there are: we
could show him the harmless files in some of them, and deny the existence
of the others.

Does this make sense as an idea? I think Andrew McDonald said somewhere that
he thought of doing something like this, but changed his mind, so maybe
there's some problem I haven't thought of.

Anyway, I think this would be a lot easier that the file system idea. It's
just a modification of the loopback device driver; all of this fits into
one source code file, so it's a lot less complicated than any file system.

Any comments?

John