Decrypting geli volumes with portable software

The geli infrastructure is strongly linked with FreeBSD and I didn't discover any documentation of the data formats. So, in the wake of my concerns about being able to read backups on Linux I read a lot of freebsd source code and now I've written a portable (I hope) userspace program which can decrypt at least a toy geli-encrypted volume.

It's called ungeli and I'm going to try letting it live on github instead of a personal git repo. So far it's a toy in that I've only tested it on a toy volume, the performance is not tuned, but it does seem to work and due to is smallness (<600SLOC at present) it may be a useful second reference if you too wish to understand geli.

Update: I added nbd support and squashed some bugs. Now I've succeeded in retrieving files from a geli-encrypted zfs volume on Linux using zfs-on-linux:

# ./ungeli -j geli-passfile npool.img /dev/nbd0 &
# zpool import -d /dev -o readonly=on npool      # (imports /dev/nbd0)
# cat /npool/example/GPL-3
                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
                       Version 3, 29 June 2007

 Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  <http://fsf.org/>
...

Entry first conceived on 30 November 2013, 2:29 UTC, last modified on 1 December 2013, 15:02 UTC
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