Root filesystem encryption update

[Thomas Swan]

On 6/18/07, n0dalus <n0dalus+redhat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/19/07, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> >
> > I think waiting for a complete solution is not the way to proceed. There
> are
> > several different steps involved with the solution. If some of the steps
> > have workable solutions, getting them included in the distribution will
> > help get them tested and allow other people to build upon the previous
> work.
> > It might be hard to recruit people to do some of the things that will be
> > eventually needed until there is some base functionallity for them to
> play
> > with.
> >
> > You don't have to advertise full disk encryption for the masses as soon
> as
> > there is some support for booting with an encrypted root partition.
> >
>
> Does full disk encryption have many advantages over directory-based
> encryption? It seems like a lot less pain to be able to boot into X
> and just have important directories encrypted.


It generally starts to suck after the first password is entered and you have
to have another.  The great thing about encrypting / is config files.
wpa_supplicant.conf which may have a key or password.   DNS autoupdate
scripts.   There can be lots of private information for a personal
workstation stored in /etc or in system scripts.  In this system, only /boot
needs to be unencrypted.

One problem I see in both approaches is access control. Many computers
> are used by more than one person, and instead of giving everyone the
> one password (and having to change it whenever someone leaves the pool
> of trusted people), it might be better to make sure these methods use
> username/password combos which can be added and revoked.
>
>
Let me chime in here.   LUKS supports up to 8 passwords on one volume.  This
isn't hard to manage as long as the person doesn't remove your other
password.   This approach has a couple of novel advantages.

With the LVM approach, swap is encrypted.  It's encrypted on the layer under
LVM, so you can hibernate on an encrypted volume.   The restore operation is
great.  I know use the same approach with a larger swap, and use tmpfs
backed /tmp to better utilized swap/temp and the extra beauty of suspending
to encrypted swap.
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