The CryptoBox

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News

Overview

The CryptoBox is a Debian/Linux based live-cd. This CD boots up, starting a secure fileserver. Even non-technical users are able to store their data on its encrypted harddisk. There is no special knowledge about cryptography or servers required at all.
The CryptoBox is fully controllable via your web browser. Have a look at the ScreenShots.

Use the web interface of the CryptoBox in your favourite language:

Specifications

some rather technical details:

systemDebian/Linux based Live-CD
needed hardware "outdated" PC (i386 p1-100 32MB RAM minimum)
supported clients*nix; *bsd; Windows; Mac OS
fileserversamba (network shares)
userinterfacefully remote controlled via webbrowser
encryptionAES via device-mapper

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What we share

We do our best to help you using the CryptoBox.

What you might share

You are not just a consumer. You can help others with your knowledge.

Development

Acknowledgements

Legal stuff

  1. All scripts are GPL licensed
  2. The documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons License
  3. We do not take any warranty for the functionality or usability of the CryptoBox.

Comments

Comment by anonymous on Tue Nov 29 13:54:27 2005

Let me just make sure I understand correctly. The protected data is encrypted on the Cryptobox drive, but is available in clear on the network, between the cryptobox and the user. Right?

see the whole discussion at ticket #83*

Comment by anonymous on Sun Dec 4 06:51:50 2005

Do you have suggestions on how to secure the file transfer in a platform independent way?

Perhaps the simplest thing to do would be make (one version of) CryptoBox be a https (secure web server). (Instead of, or in addition to, being a samba file server).

Web browsers use encryption when they upload a file to a "https:// " web server, right? (using a <FORM> with <INPUT type="file" name="name_of_files">, see http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.4 ). Then one (static) web page on that server asks users to upload files using such a form.

All https servers use encryption when they download files, right? So another (dynamic) web page on that server lists all of that user's files. Each one is hotlinked, so the user simply clicks on it to download / view it.

Perhaps a bit kludgy, but I think even unexperienced users could figure it out.

see the whole discussion at ticket #83*, too

Comment by anonymous on Sat Dec 10 12:15:55 2005

What happens when there are multiple hard drives in the machine? Will it erase all? Does it combine them to one share with something like raid or lvm, or will they be mountable as different shares? I'd try myself, but I currently only have one free hdd to test with. btw, wonderful tool, keep up the good work, and tell us if you need more testers :-)

If there are multiple harddisks available, then it will use only the first.
We are going to implement an interface to manually partition harddisks and choose more than one of them for (seperated) encrypted containers. This feature should be available in the next release (v0.3).
If you would like to help us (e.g. by testing), then you could subscribe to the mailing list.

Comment by anonymous on Sat May 6 10:41:21 2006

Could the hdd be external usb or firewire?

yes - version 2.1 should support usb drives (firewire will work with 3.0)