Security is a big business. People everywhere want to secure their files. Manufacturers don’t want CAD drawings to leave their plants. Governments want to be sure only specifically authorized people can read specific documents. And everyone wants to encrypt their “stuff” before they store it in the ubiquitous cloud. And, while just about everyone has settled on AES-256 these days, everyone has a laundry list of specifics of how they want their Key Management done.
Dynamic, per-file, transparent, encryption… where you store meta-data within the file… is shockingly difficult to implement correctly across multiple file systems and multiple versions of Windows. I mean really, really, hard. Multiply the complexity by approximately a factor of magnitude if you want to provide simultaneous “raw” and “cooked” views of the same file (thereby requiring you to write an Isolation Minifilter).
Multiply the above-described complexity by the number of OTHER Minifilters on a Windows system that you need to “play nice” with. For example antivirus. Or backup. Or license management. Or cloud filters (THERE’s one for the ages, right there).
Remember: The goal is for Arbitrary Application A to be able to open encrypted files for authorized users entirely transparently… and display and process clear text… and then write back changed data that is encrypted… without any change in said Arbitrary Application.
It’s a very, very, difficult problem.
I’ve even discovered that OSR offers a commercial product for this, FESF
That’s quite a “discovery”… it’s been one of our primary products, and described in detail on our web site, for several years. The fact that we have such a product allows me to be able to speak definitively on the complexity of accomplishing this goal.
It’s super-easy to throw some shit together and make a demo work. It’s reasonably easy to throw some shit together and make it work for a very specific, special-purposes, set of uses. The road is littered with the bodies of people who call us and say they are “one bug away” from having their stuff work. Sadly, they don’t yet know that they’re seeing a “false summit.”
So… that’s pretty much the story. I hope that works toward satisfying your curiosity.
Peter