Practical cryptographic data integrity protection with full disk encryption

Abstract

Full Disk Encryption (FDE) has become a widely used security feature. Although FDE can provide confidentiality, it generally does not provide cryptographic data integrity protection. We introduce an algorithm-agnostic solution that provides both data integrity and confidentiality protection at the disk sector layer. Our open-source solution is intended for drives without any special hardware extensions and is based on per-sector metadata fields implemented in software. Our implementation has been included in the Linux kernel since the version 4.12.