How to access my old encrypted files even though EncFS is no longer supported in Homebrew for macOS.

1. Start by installing a third-party formula that some nice people maintain:

   brew install gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac

2. Immediately get disappointed when it fails. Turns out it requires openssl@1.1 which has been deprecated by Homebrew:

   ==> Fetching dependencies for gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac: openssl@1.1
   Error: openssl@1.1 has been disabled because it is not supported upstream! It was disabled on 2024-10-24.

How to install the (no longer supported) openssl@1.1 formula.

1. Force the download of the core formula repository:

   brew tap --force homebrew/core

2. Edit the formula and remove the deprecation enforcement:

   brew edit openssl@1.1

   Comment out line 29, so it looks like:

     #disable! date: "2024-10-24", because: :unsupported

3. Perform installation of openssl@1.1 from the locally modified formula:

   HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1 brew install openssl@1.1

Now we can install EncFS successfully.

brew install gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac                    
==> Fetching gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac
==> Downloading https://github.com/gromgit/homebrew-fuse/releases/download/encfs-mac-1.9.5/encfs-mac-1.9.5.arm64_monterey.bottle.tar.gz
==> Downloading from https://objects.githubusercontent.com/github-production-release-asset-[...]
==> Installing encfs-mac from gromgit/fuse
==> Pouring encfs-mac-1.9.5.arm64_monterey.bottle.tar.gz
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json
🍺  /opt/homebrew/Cellar/encfs-mac/1.9.5: 65 files, 2.2MB
==> Running `brew cleanup encfs-mac`...

If desired, we can now run brew untap homebrew/core to cleanup the local copy of the formula repository.

Next step is to enable the (earlier installed) MacFuse kernel extension.
On macOS Sequoia this is a quite complicated process (needs disabling of multiple security features and some reboots).
Luckily the people from the MacFuse project have compiled a nice illustrated guide.

After this process is completed, we can finally decrypt the EncFS files.

encfs -v -f ./encrypted-folder ./mountpoint

The unencrypted files are available at ./mountpoint.
In my case I copied them to another folder as I no longer intend to use EncFS.

With the job done, I removed again all the EncFS software and re-enabled the security features of macOS.

brew uninstall encfs-mac
brew uninstall openssl@1.1
brew uninstall macfuse

Then reboot into the Recovery environment and in the Startup Security Utility set the Security Policy again to Full Security. 🔐