vgough/encfs

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: prerelease_only

Adoption not part of the score

2160 stars · 281 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

EncFS is a userspace encrypted virtual filesystem built on FUSE, originally released in 2003 and recently rewritten in Rust. It transparently encrypts individual files, translating virtual filesystem requests into encrypted operations on the underlying raw filesystem, and supports both legacy EncFS volumes and a new tamper-safe V7 configuration with Argon2id and AES-256-GCM-SIV.

Use cases

• encrypt files in a cloud-synced folder
• create an encrypted directory without root or full-disk encryption
• mount an encrypted filesystem in userspace on Linux
• access old EncFS 1.9.x encrypted volumes
• protect sensitive data on a shared or untrusted machine

When to choose

• you need per-file encryption in userspace without admin rights
• you have existing EncFS-encrypted data to read or maintain
• you want a lightweight encrypted folder rather than full-disk encryption

When to avoid

• you are setting up a brand-new encrypted filesystem and can use gocryptfs or full-disk encryption instead
• you need a production-hardened solution - the Rust rewrite is beta
• you need kernel-level performance or Windows support

Facets

application · maturity experimental

cryptography file-system security cli security privacy files developer-tools cli cross-platform fuse encrypted-filesystem userspace-filesystem argon2id aes-gcm-siv rust-rewrite linux macos

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