guardian_project_iocipher_update

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Exciting Updates to IOCipher 1.0

We are thrilled to announce that a community contributor has picked up maintaining a fork of IOCipher and updated to IOCipher 1.0, designed to enhance your development experience and empower you to create even more powerful applications. Here’s what’s new and why it matters to you:

1. Enhanced Features

We introduced a few new features. Now you can enjoy IOCipher also on Desktop Java for Linux and Windows (Windows does currently not support all features). And there is an example in python to access IOCipher VFS.

2. Dependency updates

We updated to the newest SQLCipher and OpenSSL.

3. Bug Fixes and Stability

Now your virutal files can be as large as you want, there is no longer a hard limit at 4 GB. We fixed some bugs that testing the JNI code with ASAN has found.

IOCipher: Encrypted Virtual Disk (for Android and Linux JVM)

IOCipher is a virtual encrypted disk for apps without requiring the device to be rooted. It uses a clone of the standard java.io API for working with files. Just password handling & opening the virtual disk are what stand between developers and fully encrypted file storage. It is based on libsqlfs and SQLCipher.

IOCipher is based on transactions in SQLite, which means that it does not require being mounted in the normal sense. There is no open state once a transaction is complete. Each read or write operation is a self-contained SQLite transaction, so if the file system is forcably quit, SQLite’s transactions prevent the whole file system from being corrupted. This is important in Android since an Activity or Service can be killed at any moment without warning.

Features

Comes with all batteries included
Secure transparent app-level virtual encrypted disk
Multi-threaded access
No root required
Only three new methods to learn: VirtualFileSystem.get(), VirtualFileSystem.mount(dbFile, password), and VirtualFileSystem.unmount()
Supports Android API 21 and above
Supports Java version 8 and above on Desktop

Adding IOCipher to your App

Here are the things you need to do in your code to make it use IOCipher encrypted storage for all of your app's file storage:

add to your project build.gradle

allprojects {
    repositories {
        google()
        mavenCentral()
        maven {
            url "https://jitpack.io"
        }
    }
}

add to your module build.gradle

implementation 'com.github.zoff99:pkgs_guardianprojectIOCipher:1.0.4'

get the VFS singleton using VirtualFileSystem.get()
on first run, create the container file with a password using VirtualFileSystem.createNewContainer(dbFile, password)
mount the container file with a password using VirtualFileSystem.mount(dbFile, password)
replace the relevant java.io import statements with info.guardianproject.iocipher

import info.guardianproject.iocipher.File;
import info.guardianproject.iocipher.FileOutputStream;
import info.guardianproject.iocipher.FileReader;
import info.guardianproject.iocipher.IOCipherFileChannel;
import info.guardianproject.iocipher.VirtualFileSystem;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.nio.channels.Channels;
import java.nio.channels.ReadableByteChannel;

Source Code

all you need for your project: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack

optional:

a simple test app for Android: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack/tree/master/007_example_android
a simple example desktop file manager app: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack/tree/master/004_example_jvm
a simple python example for Linux: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack/tree/master/006_example_python
a simple C API example for Linux: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack/tree/master/005_example_c
a simple C API example for Windows: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack/tree/master/005_example_c_win64
the core: https://github.com/zoff99/iocipher_pack/tree/master/002_src_libsqlfs

Usage notes

only one active mount per-app is supported

zoff99/guardian_project_iocipher_update.md