Panther's FileVault has already come up in a previous discussion, but questions which I thought were pretty obvious and which I had expected at least SOMEONE on cypherpunks to pose haven't come up... Sigh. Are there any whitepapers available on the design of FileVault? Except for impressive words from marketing droids (AES-128, industry-standard cipher, <yawn>) I have seen absolutely zilch on the implementation yet: i.e. is encryption done on a per-file basis or is rather blockwise underneath the filesystem layer (ala loop-aes under Linux)? AES-128, fair enough; but what mode is used for encrypting the files/blocks? ECB? CBC? CTR? CCM? Maybe Apple ported PHK's GBDE [1], MacOS X having FreeBSD underpinnings and all that? What I'd like for Apple to do is step ahead and release the source code of FileVault for per review... Ralf [1] GBDE - GEOM based disk encryption http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcon-03.gbde.paper.pdf -- Ralf-P. Weinmann <weinmann@cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de> PGP fingerprint: 1024D/EF114FC02F150EB9D4F275B6159CEBEAEFCD9B06