MAWFS - A Personal Encrypted Distributed Filesystem

MAWFS aims to be an encrypted, distributed, branching filesystem. It is currently in early beta. You can create an encrypted filesystem and replicate with merging among a set of peers.

If you want to play with it, the easiest way to do so is to pull the docker image crack/mawfs from docker hub. Alternately, you can build from source.

MAWFS is written in Crack.. If you want to build it from source, you’ll need at least Crack 1.4, and preferably HEAD on the master branch, to do so.

Usage Example

$ mkdir backing fs  # Create a directory for the backing store and a
                    # mountpoint for the filesystem
$ export CRACK_LIB_PATH=mawfs/lib
$ echo 's3cr37-p455w0rd!' | mawfs/mawfs run backing fs
$ echo 'this will be encrypted!' >fs/myfile.txt
$ cat fs/myfile.txt
$ mawfs/mawfs commit fs  # generate a commit record.
$ fusermount -u fs  # To unmount.

Every directory in the filesytem includes a special maintenance directory (“.mawfs”, which is invisible to a directory listing) that allows you to interact with the filesystem. This current contains a “README” file containing information about MAWFS and a “branch” file containing the current branch:

$ cat fs/.mawfs/branch
master

This code is still likely to have a few bugs in it and we will likely introduce incompatibilities, so it is not recommended that you use MAWFS for anything important yet.

Current Status

The system is currently in early beta. While it is largely usable for experimental purposes, you are advised against relying on the security and integrity of the system at this time.

If you do use it for anything important, you are encouraged to make local backups and perform regular verification. You are also encouraged to subscribe to the mailing list to stay notified of any security issues that emerge.

Bug reports and code contribuutions gladly accepted. Please sign Google’s Contributor License Agreement before sending any pull requests.

Contacts

• Mailing List mawfs-dev@googlegroups.com

Related Projects

• Peergos - this is a very similar project which MAWFS will hopefully be interoperable with at some point.
• IPFS.
• ORI

“MAWFS” stands for “Mike’s Awesome Filesystem”. It started out that way and we have since been unable to come up with a better name :-)

MAWFS is not an official Google project.