Open source tools for accessing FileVault-encrypted Macs

The libfvde project's open source library and tools allow users to access data on volumes that have been encrypted with Apple's FileVault2 hard disk encryption program on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. With libfvde and fvdetools, these volumes can be read using either a Mac OS X or a Linux system.

The tools use Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) to, for example, mount an image of a Mac system disk encrypted with FileVault2. To this end, they extract the volume master key – although the user still needs to unlock it by entering the password. This means that if a user doesn't know the volume's password, libfvde can't access the encoded data. A wiki page explains the first steps involved for working with fvdemount and other programs.