EGA-QuickView

EGA-QuickView is a FUSE file system to access EGA files remotely. It works on Linux and macOS 12.

From the libfuse description:

FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) is an interface for userspace programs to export a filesystem to the Linux kernel. The FUSE project consists of two components: the fuse kernel module (maintained in the regular kernel repositories) and the libfuse userspace library [...]. libfuse provides the reference implementation for communicating with the FUSE kernel module.

EGA-QuickView is a combination of sshfs and crypt4ghfs. That is, we communicate with the EGA distribution servers over ssh, download files (chunk by chunk) in Crypt4GH format and decrypt them transparently.

It is useful for a user to quickly browse through a file, without downloading it entirely before being able to open it. It looses its purpose if the user plans on scanning the entire file. For that latter, it is more appropriate to download the files using the Aspera solution, and decrypt the files locally with Crypt4GH.

Installation

We need a few required packages (gcc, make, libsodium, libfuse, autoconf...)

# On Debian-like systems
apt install libfuse3-dev autoconf gcc make pkg-config libsodium-dev libssl-dev libglib2.0-dev

# On others
# TODO

You can then compile the EGA-qv code with:

autoreconf -i
./configure
make

Example

EGA-QuickView works over SSH and uses Crypt4GH. It therefore needs a Crypt4GH-compatible key. 2 arguments are required: the location of the EGA server and a mountpoint. Credentials to connect to the EGA server can be passed similarly to a classic SSH connection. The Crypt4GH key must be passed as a -o argument, in the options list.

ega-qv [options] <EGA-server> <mountpoint>

For example, the user silverdaz can connect to outbox.ega-archive.org, using:

ega-qv -o seckey=~/.ssh/c4gh.key [email protected] ~/EGA

You will get prompted for the Crypt4GH passphrase (and eventually your password to connect to the server, unless you used an ssh-key (recommended)).

Todo

• Create documentation on ReadTheDocs
• Remove the passphrase prompt if the key is not locked (Not recommended).