#1084455 encfs: move from fuse to fuse3

Package:
encfs
Source:
encfs
Description:
encrypted virtual filesystem
Submitter:
Date:
2026-02-23 17:39:33 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1084455#5
Date:
2024-10-07 10:20:01 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

your package currently (Build-)Depends on fuse - that is fuse 2.x, it
being obsolete. A newer version of fuse, fuse3, is available since at
least buster.

Please migrate your package to the fuse3 library, which is actively
maintained. It would be great if we could remove fuse 2.x in the
forky development cycle.

If you cannot migrate yet, please at least update your Depends: line.
If you currently have:

please update that to:

This allows mount.fuse and fusermount to be provided by fuse3, which
is what the majority of new installs already have [1]. You should
still migrate from libfuse 2.x to libfuse 3.x later.

fuse upstream noted important differences in [2].

[1] compare https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=fuse and
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=fuse3

[2] https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/releases/tag/fuse-3.0.0

#1084455#10
Date:
2025-09-03 23:06:36 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

I'm raising the severity of the fuse2 -> fuse3 migration bugs to
important. Later in the forky cycle I'll likely raise them once
more.

Please update your package to use fuse3 (incl. the library) and stop
(build-)depending on the old fuse v2.

Thanks,
Chris

#1084455#21
Date:
2025-11-16 22:33:26 UTC
From:
To:
Control: forwarded -1 https://github.com/vgough/encfs/issues/495
...

Hi, Chris and Eduard,

While the first part is trivial the second one is not that trivial.

I have noticed that this was reported upstream back in 2018, so I am tagging
this bug report as forwarded.

Unfortunately, upstream has declared encfs as unmaintained. Dirk Jagdmann
(doj) suggested fuse3 related commits and opened a pull request for this

https://github.com/vgough/encfs/pull/664

He has a repo at

https://github.com/doj/encfs.git

which he maintains as an encfs fork, do not know if personal or for general
use. According to its README.md it is intended to support fuse3 library and
OpenSSL 3.

Hope this helps,

#1084455#30
Date:
2025-12-08 22:29:45 UTC
From:
To:
...

Hi,

I have been testing some of the commits there and, while at a first glance
things seemed to work, further inspection shows some weird things that makes
me discourage its use. Together with the reported encfs security issues seems
more clear that unless something changes encfs will go away with fuse2.

I am showing some of the problems I noticed.

$ mkdir -p .crypto/ target/
$ encfs `pwd`/.crypto `pwd`/target
$ touch target/00-HI-ENCRYPTED

## --- Using official Debian 1.9.5-3 encfs Debian package ---
$ ls -la target/
total 8
drwxrwsr-x 2 myuser myuser 4096 dic  3 17:43 .
drwxrwsr-x 4 myuser myuser 4096 dic  3 18:19 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 myuser myuser    0 dic  3 17:42 00-HI-ENCRYPTED

## --- Using new encfs 1.9.5-3~1 with fuse3 patches. Creation ---
$ ls -al target/
total 8
drwxrwsr-x          2 myuser myuser 4096 dic  3 18:28 .
drwxrwsr-x          4 myuser myuser 4096 dic  3 18:28 ..
---------- 3651136296 root   saned     0 dic  1  4458884 00-HI-ENCRYPTED

## --- Using new encfs 1.9.5-3~1 with fuse3 patches. Further mount ---
$ ls -al target/
total 69999410541872
drwxrwsr-x        2 myuser myuser           4096 dic  3 18:28 .
drwxrwsr-x        4 myuser myuser           4096 dic  3 18:29 ..
---------- 67103528 root   root   93983110258336 oct 13  4438351 00-HI-ENCRYPTED

This last changes slightly from mount to mount.

Using -f option with relative paths results in

$ encfs -f ./.crypto ./target

d?????????  ? ?      ?         ?            ? target

be shown by ls -la in top dir. Using it with absolute paths results in something
similar as above.

Regards,

#1084455#35
Date:
2025-12-19 11:58:15 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Agustin,

actually doj has created a PR some time ago, see
https://github.com/vgough/encfs/pull/664 . Maybe you can post your
concerns there and not just in our bug db?

TBH I am hopping to switch to the Rust reimplementation when it's
finished (@Valient: I hope that this rust branch is more than just a toy
project... could you confirm? Do you need help, assistance?). Maybe all
that all this security issues talk would become obsolete as well.
And the responsibility for fuse handling would be moved to the fuse_mt
crate.

Best regards,
Eduard.

* Agustin Martin [Mon, Dec 08 2025, 11:29:45PM]: