Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'm new to ecryptfs and I need some clarification on how it works.
Suppose there are two root users userA and userB, If I mount some folder under userA:
[userA@Dev] $ mount ecryptfs real img
now I can visit the img folder to access decrypted data.

My questions is:
While userA is still in log in state. Can userB login and access the decrypted data? This is currently what I observed on my local machine, but I'm not sure if it was cause by my misconfiguration. If it is the case, how can I avoid other users from accessing the decrypted data while userA is in login state?

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

Yes its possible to access other users decrypted data, since eCryptFS does not distincts who is accessing a file. eCryptFS only manages the encryption/decryption of the files on the disk. As soon as it is mounted, any permitted user can read/write encrypted files transparently.

However, Linux has other technics to define access to a file or directory: E.g. the POSIX file permissions. So its highly recommended to simply restrict access to a private directory to only the user who has the key to it...

chown -R user ~/Private
chmod -R 700 ~/Private

There is also a FAQ entry: http://ecryptfs.sourceforge.net/ecryptfs-faq.html#no-ecryptfsac

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


