Musings about on-disk encryption in Fedora Core

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 19:00, mike at flyn.org wrote:
> > - encrypted file system partitions or logical volumes
> 
> I am working on implementing encrypted root filesystem support to mkinitrd. 
> See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124789 for more
> information and an patch.

I looked at the patch any I see the problem that you need to call
mkinitrd with certain arguments in order for this to work. This should
just kind of determine the parameters (i.e. read them from a config file
written while creating the encrypted root device) used on the current
root fs and apply them automatically so that calls to mkinitrd from e.g.
the kernel pkgs' %post scripts work.

> > - user owned encrypted storage (encrypted loop devices, can substitute
> >   encrypted directories to a certain degree)
> 
> This can be implemented pretty nicely using pam_mount
> (http://www.flyn.org/projects/pam_mount/index.html) because pam_mount can
> unlock filesystems at login time using a user's system authentication token. 
> An article I wrote for the Linux Journal on the subject of encrypted home
> directories is available at http://www.flyn.org/docs/ehd.pdf.  Note that
> there have been some changes to pam_mount since the article's publication
> last year.

I was thinking of a slightly different thing, i.e. you only mount the
encrypted, potentially sensitive stuff when you need it and you
definitely don't want it to be unlocked for everyone who -- by whatever
means -- knows your login password. So these two cases need to be
treated differently as well, though I like your implementing support for
the key to be on e.g. a USB stick, this would be helpful for what I
described, too.

> There is also an active bug that asks for encrypted filesystem support in
> general: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56698.

This would basically be "discussing this outside of fedora-devel-list",
i.e. getting a sensible interface somewhere upstream (in this instance,
extending mount to deal with encrypted file systems).

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
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