1 January 2009 by Lars

Secure and convenient file sharing between (Linux) computers (sorry Windows, Symbian)

This is a quick hack, but it works like a charm (although its utility might be debated, since you can achieve the same functionality with SSHFS):

1. have the Dropbox daemon running.
2. Create a directory “secure” within the Dropbox-synced folder. This will hold your encrypted data
3. Create a mountpoint outside of the Dropbox-synced folder.
4. Then run ‘encfs /home/$user/Dropbox/secure /home/$user/decrypted’

This will yield encrypted data at rest on Dropbox. The data is already encrypted in transit to Dropbox, but it is not quite clear if it is encrypted at rest on the Dropbox servers.

You won’t be able to read the data on non-Linux computers (or is there a ENCFS implementation for Windows?), so you might as well use a SSHFS system anyway, for arbitrary quantities for free (instead of the 2GB limit on Dropbox), but if you want to mix-and-match secure and non-secure files, the latter will be available on non-Linux devices as well, from one central location.