Encrypted home directory

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 07:47:15PM +0100, David Nielsen wrote:
> I've been running using dm-crypt for a while now but it seems to me that
> when all I have is some photos and documents I don't want to fall into the
> wrong hands in case my machine is stolen, it's seems like overkill to
> encrypt everything. Additionally it's some what cumbersome to have to unlock
> the drive during boot. Another problem might be the performance hit of full
> disk encryption on these low powered netbooks being unacceptable making
> those a good target for a more lightweight solution?

Won't solve your unlocking problem, but why not have a separate
encrypted /home partition?  I've had separate /home partitions for
years, not for encryption, just because that's the directory I really
care about, so I want to be able to handle it specially anyway.

The other reason to _not_ encrypt the system directories is so that
system files can be easily mmapped into memory.  And after all, there
is no secret in the system files.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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