Encrypt a folder on a Samba share?
 

Hey all,

We're running Samba on a RHEL5 file server. It's also sharing the same folder via NFS. We need to encrypt 1 folder in this share. It's not a top level or anything, but rather a sub-folder that's part of the share. This folder contains confidential information, but also needs to be accessible by multiple people on the network. For compliance reasons, the data in this folder needs to be encrypted using AES encryption or better.

What kind of options do we have here? I'm not finding much of anything that will work here in such a way that the folder and file contents are encrypted, but still easy to bring up from any of the clients that have access.

The file server is running Samba 3.5.
Windows clients range from XP Home to Win7 Pro.

Any thoughts here?

Thanks!

Against what risks does this folder need to be encrypted? Just physical access to the server?

If any authenticated Samba user should have easy access to it, you could use ecryptfs mounted by root on the server (thus the files would appear unencrypted when a samba user tries to access them).

If you need each user to enter the decryption password/key separately, but still all access the same files, that's more of a problem.