Locking up Linux: Creating a Cryptobook

Benchmarks And Analysis

The performance difference between a native installation and a LUKS-encrypted installation is marginal when you consider the tremendous difference in numbers between userspace file system implementations. Iozone is used to chart performance on the mounted cryptographic file systems one at a time, where each one uses the same portion of a single disk drive. Benchmarking uses record lengths from 4 kB to 16 MB for file sizes ranging between 64 kB to 512 MB, and all results are posted in kB/sec.

Here are the results from write operations to the partition in the various formats: native, LUKS-encrypted, and the userspace methods CryptoFS and EncFS, respectively: