Last week, I bought a pair of 200G IDE disks, just because they were dirt cheap. Probably I'll use one at home and one at work. I already have a 150G at home for music and such.
I used to be a SCSI snob – and I guess in some ways I still am – but I just can’t afford that habit anymore! Although I miss the performance of SCSI, the price differential per GB is enormous. The drop in performance is definitely noticeable, particularly since I now have two large disks on the same bus. Any disk-intensive activity also drives up the CPU load, which it never would do with SCSI. And forget running more than one disk-intensive process at a time. If I'm still on the computer when ‘updatedb’ starts running, it's time for bed.
Anyway, in rearranging my file systems at home, I decided to try something new. I now have my root and /home file systems on encrypted partitions. Why? Just because I can, I guess. It might be a fairly valuable technique on a laptop, which is more easily lost or stolen. At least then, you can be reasonably confident the thief can't access your data.
On a home desktop machine though, crypto seems admittedly frivolous. Am I part of the tinfoil hat set, who thinks the FBI (or some darker, more sinister organization) is going to sneak in and confiscate or clone my drives? Do I have anything on there to hide anyway? Not really. But I do believe strongly in a right to privacy. And if we don't exercise the rights we do have, we are likely to lose them.
The Disk Encryption HOWTO by David Braun was essential reading, although I didn't follow its prescriptions precisely. You will need a Linux 2.6 kernel with ‘cryptoloop’ and ‘aes’ compiled in, and the ‘loop-aes-utils’ package that provides crypto-aware versions of ‘mount’ and ‘losetup’.
What happens, essentially, is this: I keep a small unencrypted boot partition near the beginning of the disk. It contains the kernel, the aforementioned ‘loop-aes-utils’, some scripts, a set of keys, and a few other essential binaries: sh, ls, and pivot_root. I configure grub to boot and root from this partition, and provide the kernel with a custom init script. This script prompts the console for a master password (must be 20 or more characters), and uses this to unlock an image containing the keys to each partition. The keys themselves are totally random 60-character strings.
Once the keys are available, the init script uses ‘losetup’ to configure crypto-enhanced loop-back devices for each partition. Then it can unmount the keys, mount the soon-to-be root partition, pivot_root to it, and invoke the real /sbin/init. The remaining partitions will be mounted automatically later on, so long as you use the /dev/loop devices in /etc/fstab, or better yet, refer to them by filesystem label.
LABEL=debian-root / ext3 defaults 0 1 LABEL=linux-home /home ext3 defaults 0 2 LABEL=linux-swap none swap sw 0 0It sounds fancy, but once I was familiar with the tools and their capabilities, it wasn't that bad to set up. The HOWTO describes booting off of a USB stick that contains the keys and kernel; this way authentication is based on something you know (master password) and something you have (the USB stick). This was too much of a pain for my home setup, plus my BIOS is too old to boot from USB.
What took the most work was allaying my fears that I'd be totally hosed when something goes wrong with the boot process. It turns out that the current Ubuntu Live CD (6.06) includes a kernel with the required modules. So I can boot from the Live CD, mount my /boot partition, and then manually use the keys to mount my encrypted partitions. The only important thing is to keep a safe backup of the boot partition, especially the keys. If I lose those 60-character keys I really am hosed. Currently I have /boot mirrored on both disks, and the keys file copied on various other machines.
Why not just encrypt /home, or even just $HOME for the current user? Encrypting the root filesystem is something of a pain, involving as it does a pivot_root and delicate boot-time hacking. As the HOWTO points out, a GNU/Linux system really makes no guarantees about information flow; there's no telling what stuff from /home may show up in /var/log or wherever. So it's simplest just to encrypt everything, including the swap partition.
So maybe this display of Linux wizardry makes up for my gaffe about iptables earlier in the week. :)
(Funny that I started this post complaining about the performance of IDE drives, and then proceeded to add a layer of encryption on top of that. I haven't done extensive benchmarking, but I did run ‘iozone’ a few times, and as far as I can tell the crypto only slows down reads and writes by 1 or 2%.)
