It has become important to reliably protect stored digital data, both against becoming inaccessible as well as becoming available to third parties. Using a file system which guarantees data integrity protects against data losses, disk encryption protects against data breaches. Encryption is still thought to incur a large performance penalty when accessing the data. This thesis evaluates different approaches to data encryption using low-power hardware and open-source software, with a focus on the advanced file system OpenZFS, which features excellent protection against data loss but does not include encryption. It is shown that encryption using LUKS beneath ZFS is a viable method of gaining data protection, especially when using hardwareaccelerated encryption algorithms. Using a low-power server CPU with native AES instructions, ZFS as the file system and LUKS for encryption of the block device permits ensuring data integrity and protection at a low cost.

@misc{PEODEIFSBE14,
	author	 = {Hajo Möller},
	title	 = {{Performance Evaluation of Data Encryption in File Systems -- Benchmarking ext4, ZFS, LUKS and eCryptfs}},
	advisors	 = {Michael Kuhn and Konstantinos Chasapis},
	year	 = {2014},
	month	 = {12},
	school	 = {Universität Hamburg},
	type	 = {Bachelor's Thesis},
	abstract	 = {It has become important to reliably protect stored digital data, both against becoming inaccessible as well as becoming available to third parties. Using a file system which guarantees data integrity protects against data losses, disk encryption protects against data breaches. Encryption is still thought to incur a large performance penalty when accessing the data. This thesis evaluates different approaches to data encryption using low-power hardware and open-source software, with a focus on the advanced file system OpenZFS, which features excellent protection against data loss but does not include encryption. It is shown that encryption using LUKS beneath ZFS is a viable method of gaining data protection, especially when using hardwareaccelerated encryption algorithms. Using a low-power server CPU with native AES instructions, ZFS as the file system and LUKS for encryption of the block device permits ensuring data integrity and protection at a low cost.},
}