Ubuntu Installation :: Full-disk Encryption On Netbook?
Jan 29, 2011
I managed to get a cheap refurbed netbook recently (Samsung N150) and I'm wanting to put Ubuntu on it. As it's also likely to be used when travelling and have things like chat logs, photos, and other such things I'd like to do full disk encryption. Also I've been pointed towards 10.4 as apparently the 10.10 netbook desktop isn't to everyone's taste.
So I tried using unetbootin to make a bootable 10.4.1 i386 Alternate usb stick, which hit the problem of no cd drive. I found an item to add to the boot (cdrom-detect/try-usb=true) which got it a little further, but at a copying stage it threw an error saying it couldn't copy off the disc.
Finally I tried making a unetbootin of the mini iso (does mini even support full disk encryption?) but that seems to hang after selecting a mirror.
EDIT: Well it seems I was just impatient on the mini ISO and after a few minutes it's gone onto time-zone, though of course this could get rather tiresome without a local mirror, especially given this may go through more than one iteration.
I would like to configure my Debian Jessie system in this way.
Two partitions:
1) /boot on /dev/sda1 2) everything else on /dev/sda2
I want to encrypt the second partition with LUKS. And then install over it a LVM volume. Inside the LVM volume i will create the / (root), /var, /opt and /home virtual partitions. In this way, i'll get asked only once for the password to decrypt all partitions. Because if i don't use LVM, then i'll get asked for the password for each encrypted partition.
I can follow and understand almost everything of this HOW-TO for Archlinux: [URL] ....
Only two passages are unclear to me:
1) Configuring mkinitcpio
I don't understand what i should do here in order to complete this. What should i do in Debian to configure "mkinitcpio"? what is the equivalent thing to do here?
I thought that the kernel would automatically recompile itself with all installed modules on the Debian system, once cryptosetup/LUKS or LVM2 get installed.
2) Configuring the boot loader
I don't understand what should i write in /etc/default/grub. Will GRUB automatically load the LUKS and LVM2 modules? Also, I don't think that i could boot the system in this way:
I've been wanting to do this for a while and after upgrading some of my pc components I decided I would finally try to dual boot with full disk encryption on both windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10. I managed to encrypt the windows drive with truecrypt and that worked. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 using the alternate cd and everything but /boot is in an encrypted LVM. Each OS is on a separate SATA drive the windows is on sda1 and ubuntu /boot is sdb1.
To setup the dual boot I started out following the tutorial [url] but its for XP and versions of ubuntu that use grub not grub 2. I ran dd as posted and saved the files it produced from truecrypt. I then ran into some problems with grub reinstallation so I simply reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 from scratch again. This put grub 2 on the computer. I've managed to get it to add a Windows 7 option.
However, when the option is selected truecrypt comes up and says that the bootloader is corrupted and that I need to use the repair CD I burned before I encrypted the drive. My question is does anyone have any experience dual booting using Truecrypt on Windows 7 and LUKS/dm-crypt on Ubuntu 9.10 with grub 2? And how would I get the boot menu to work? I'd rather not reinstall but if I have to I have images from right before I encrypted so it wouldn't be the end of the world.
To structure the layout of my partitions. I'm installing Windows 7, Backtrack 4 R2 and Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop on my laptop. I've got a 500 GB HDD named sda.
I've already installed Windows 7. It's my opinion that it's easiest to begin with Windows.
The partitions look like this right now:
The Windows installation is unencrypted and I want it to stay that way. It's only there in case my laptop gets stolen, I've installed various nasty things there.
The Backtrack 4 installation will also be given 100 GB space, I want it to be encrypted. The Ubuntu installation should get the rest of all the remaining space and preferably be encrypted but it's not 100% necessary.
How I should partition this? There's a limit on 4 primary partitions? How do I circumvent this? There should be one dedicated GRUB partition which will point to each of the installations own boot loaders?
I have a bunch of pictures that I thought I had backed up but as it turns out I didn't, the problem is I formatted the drive they were on.
It is a 1TB hard drive, and it was running Ubuntu 10.10 using full disk encryption from the alternate install CD. After formatting, I installed Ubuntu Server 10.10, also using full disk encryption.
I know the encryption key for both installs (and the keys in fact are the same).
I have turned off the machine, and have stopped writing to the disk. I am hoping because it is a 1TB drive, and I have only written over it with 2GB of data, that there is a chance I can recover the data.
Is there a way to install ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 with full disk encryption? I read how to do it in the 8.0 version, was wondering if it is still possible?
The only reason why I don't use Linux (even though I prefer Linux over Windows, and can do everything faster and more efficiently) is because each time I try to learn about dm-crypt I give up.
Can someone point me in the right direction for full OTFE on Linux (like TrueCrypt)?
I do know about cold boot attacks. But I ran across a couple of posts/websites that had me wonder if it is possible, without the passphrase, to just remove the encryption?
this isn't really a security question, per se, so feel free to move. It is related to full disk LVM encryption though. Full disk didn't work for me with grub2 after running dd to a remote server, so I downgraded to grub1. No biggie. However, I have neither grub or grub2 as selected in Synaptic.Let's say I forget which I have installed. How would I determine what version of grub is installed at the moment. I'm assuming it's somehow installed on in the mbr but not on the OS. I didn't mean to do anything funky. Is that the normal setup? I'm deploying these systems to users and want to be able to troubleshoot issues in the future (hopefully that will not be needed!) grub --version does not work because it is not installed.
With all the talk about disk encryption for Apple devices, I wanted to ask about how full disk encryption compares between debian linux and mac OS X. Is the code for debian linux fully available for people to inspect for flaws or backdoors? Apparently although part of the encryption code is available for OS X the full code for Filevault 2 is not public. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method of encryption for each operating system?
I am investigating full disk encryption and have made a DD copy of the hard drive which has been encrypted, this DD file is stored on my computer for analysis.
First question is - Anyone know how i can access data in this DD file even though its been encrypted?
Second question - Is there a DD command where i can image the systems memory? I ask this because when a system is turned on, to get past the pre-boot authentication stage you need a password. From what i understand, this password will be passed in to ram when power is applied to the system. Making a copy of the memory will also copy the password?
Is it possible to encrypt the entire drive and not be prompted for the passphrase?
I have a request for a demo of our application and I am looking to create a virtual for VMware's player but need to make sure that the vmdk file cannot be mounted and files pulled from it to protect us from reverse engineering of the application.
I am trying to upgrade to 9.10 but it fails because the disk is full. I am running a Dell Mini with 16GB SSD...so there isn't a lot of free space to begin with. Added to that, I have some hefty applications (rosegarden, audacity, skype, etc) which I kind of need. Am I better off just sticking to 9.04? Are there any good ways to clean up the system and get rid of stuff that might be sticking around? I did apt-get clean and it didn't clean enough.
I've been using full disk encryption with luks on two Dell laptops for about 2.5 years. One is 64 bit Fedora (upgraded to 12), another is 32 bit Ubuntu (upgraded to 9.10), both were ext3, until recently.Over time, performance degraded substantially, especially on Fedora, which was put to a heavier use. That laptop has 4 Gb RAM, two 2.5 GHz T9300 CPUs, and 56 Gb of free space.
It was especially unbearable after a reboot. Programs like firefox and thunderbird would take close to a minute to start when ran for the first time after a boot. The login process was painfully slow, and some Gnome applets (e.g. Tomboy notes, keyboard layout switcher) would fail to load on the first login, with an error. I experienced this problem on both laptops with full encryption. I had to log out and relogin to make the applets appear. I tried various boot and mount options and was thinking about switching to ecryptfs (encrypted home).
I also use 3 desktops with no encryption and a netbook with ecryptfs on /home, which all work fine. All are Dell, 2 Ubuntu and 2 Fedora. The Gnome applets problem seems to be due to slowness of the installs with the full disk encryption. The last thing I tried is to migrate ext3 to ext4. I also converted /home, /usr, /opt to extents, following[URL].. That seemed to do the trick. Gnome applets now load fine on both laptops, and startup time is back to tolerable.
Is this a typical experience: ext3 performance degradation with time and a much better performance with full disk encryption once ext3 is migrated to ext4?
I'm trying to install a luks enabled grub for full system encryption. What modules are required by grub to load a normal ubuntu linux system and what is the type to use?
Quote: Preconfiguring packages ... (Reading database ... 78720 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace apt 0.7.25.3ubuntu9 (using .../apt_0.7.25.3ubuntu9.1_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement apt ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/apt_0.7.25.3ubuntu9.1_i386.deb (--unpack): unable to create `/usr/share/locale/dz/LC_MESSAGES/apt.mo.dpkg-new' (while processing `./usr/share/locale/dz/LC_MESSAGES/apt.mo'): No space left on device No apport report written because the error message indicates a disk full error [Code]....
Firstly I've never (successfully) upgraded before using update manager -d but I've only tried once. I'm on 10.10 at the moment but I want to make a full disk backup using Acronis and try out 11.04 beta 1 so if I can't boot (like with the 11.04 Alpha 3) I'm ok.
What I want to know is if I upgrade to beta 1 it will install new things and settings, if beta 2 is released and I upgrade to that (after having beta 1 installed) will it overwrite all the settings again? Or will I be able to spend time set beta 1 up nice how I want it (if it works) and just smoothly upgrade gradually to final 11.04 keeping it pretty much exactly how I want it?
Also with the software sources, I understand I need to disable the ones I manually added before updating from 10.10 then to re-enable them, but how do I re-enable them for Natty as they are currently for Maverick? Do I just change the word Maverick to Natty, or is it better to remove and re-add them for natty? And do the authentication keys need updating or are they ok? I don't really know a lot about the keys.
1 more thing (sorry) will an upgrade overwrite any settings I have e.g. etc/fstab, sudoers, things like that? I know when you upgrade it gives you an option for some things e.g. keep or replace, if I keep old settings from maverick does it matter? Or does 11.04 add new lines/things to these files if I choose replace?
Sorry for all the questions, I'm pretty new been using ubuntu as my only OS for couple months now and most of my time has been spent tweaking settings and I don't want to lose them, or do a clean install when 11.04 final is released as I won't ever be able to remember them all.
I'm running 11.04 desktop on a Samsung netbook. When I try and set up Evolution, I cannot see the bottom part of the windows, which would include the "Back" and "Forward" buttons. Would installing the netbook version fix this problem?
I've just unwrapped my new netbook. Its got the new Atom N450 processor and the first thing I want to do is get XP home off of it. I'm just wondering if I should install 9.10 full or download the "netbook edition". Whats the difference? Will I see better performance with the netbook or full edition? (just asking because I'd like to avoid the ~650mb download if I can)
how much of a performance impact full disk encryption (say, AES 256-bit) has on disk-related activities? On one particular project I'm involved in I am trying to weigh out security vs performance issues.
Which is the best whole hard disk encryption software for RHEL 4.6. Tried Truecrypt but was not success in making it work. First had issue with fuse version, then with glibc and etc.
Bitlocker is a harddrive encryption data protection tool which comes with Windows Vista Ultimate and 7. Does anyone know an equivalent for Linux distros like Fedora and Ubuntu?
