Comparing Encrypted Volumes in OpenBSD

Nick Schmidt has written a series of blog posts on encrypted volumes in OpenBSD. He starts off by introducing our options and covering their limitations in OpenBSD Disk Encryption Options – softraid and svnd. Nick demonstrates how to setup and manage an encrypted RAID drive with softraid and bioctl in Configuring OpenBSD softraid for encryption.

Next he shows how to use the old-fashioned svnd method in Configuring OpenBSD svnd for Encrypted Volumes which, by his own admission, is not officially supported, but is generally less cumbersome during the boot process. Finally, he also compiles a rough benchmark of each method's performance in OpenBSD Drive Encryption Benchmarks.

Editor's Note: Nick would like to emphasize that his benchmarks are purely informational and should be taken with a grain of salt. Any serious comparison between these two encryption techniques should be further scrutinized before making a decision for your production systems.