2.6 cryptoloop questions

["mike@flyn.org" <mike@flyn.org>]

I have been happily using kerneli.org's crypto patches for quite some time and 
am now begining to look at the new 2.6 code.  I have some questions util-linux 
2.12 and the cryptoloop/crypto drivers in linux 2.6.0-test2.

1.  What is the deal with adding arguments to losetup so that the program will 
support calling external hashing programs (Ben Slusky's work I think)?  I have 
been hashing passwords with openssl, a pipe and losetup's -p 0 option for quite 
some time.  Why is the additional code needed?  Am I missing something here?

2.  Is it safe to use the 2.6 code to encrypt a swap partition (or safe to
start testing this since this is all experimental code)?

3.  Mount needs to support variable key sizes.  I have seen a little discussion  
about this but I fear much of it went on using other mailing lists.  Losetup 
supports variable key sizes so mount should somehow.  Granted, losetup is not 
usually suid root, but the code addition to mount is minimal and mount is 
essentially broken without it.  Comments?

Thanks for all the work to get this stuff into 2.6 and util-linux.  I have been 
waiting for this code to go mainstream for years!

--
Mike



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Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
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