Ubuntu Security :: Justify Home Drive Is Encrypted And Decrypted During Login?
Aug 17, 2010
Lately i just reformatted my laptop again and created a encrypted home drive using the default.It prompt for my password and then i key it into the terminal.Then the terminal closed it.How to justify that the home drive is encrypted and decrypted during login?Beside that,if it is encrypted and what kinda extension is drive gonna?Apart from that,i used cryptkeeper to create a encrypted folder.How do i know if the folder is encrypted beside it prompt for me to enter my password?
I've just reinstalled my box with an encrypted home (used the encrypt home option when installing). I have a query in this regard - suppose I lose the box. Won't it be possible for someone to drop into root, reset my passwd and then access my /home. Is there anyway of having a different passwd for accessing /home? My ~ is on a different partition from /.
I just installed the testing version of Debian with the option to setup encrypted home directories. I used a passphrase that I now want to change to something else. How do I do that?
During the installation of Ubuntu Karmic, I picked the option that encrypts my home directory.
A few questions:
(1) Shortly after installation, I was asked to run a command to print a key necessary for data recovery from a rescue CD. I didn't run it at the time and am now looking for the command to run. What is it?
(2) I think I read somewhere that this also encrypts swap. Great. Correct me if that's wrong.
(3) If I suspend the machine, is my home directory encrypted? That is, if I have this on a laptop and travel with the suspended laptop and someone steals it, are my data safe, or not?
(4) I assume the weakest point in the system is my relatively short login password (but I think the install tests it and found it okay). Is there a recommendation how long this should be?
I just installed 9.10 on my laptop and selected the option for home folder encryption. I am running DropBox and placed the DropBox folder on my desktop (meaning it should be encrypted when I am logged out.) So I have two questions: 1) Shouldn't this setup cause my DropBox files on the server to be encrypted? Apparently they are not because they appear as unencrypted text using the DropBox Web interface. 2) If they were encrypted on the server (which doesn't appear to be the case right now), how would it be possible to share them with another client unless the encryption on both clients were set up identically?
While setting up my laptop on a new hard drive (a bad mobo caused writes which pretty much rendered teh old hdd unusable) I was asked if I wanted to encrypt my home partition.
I've been wanting this for several years - even going as far as trying to get a copy of CheckPoint. That's waht my organization uses on all Wintendo laptops and is required.
In any case, I said "yes" and am happily using my laptop with an encrypted home partition. I'm assuming based on this - [URL] - that it is using EncryptFS as the scheme.
if I were to misplace my laptop, how easy would it be for a forensics team to retrieve my data. Let's assume I have a fairly strong passphrase, such as BisZumBitterenEnd3. [URL]
I had some major problems after the recent Ubuntu upgrade and had to boot from a live cd. I have a separate /home partition, but it was encrypted using the default install encryption in the 9.10 install cd. How can I get to my files so I can back them up?
I have tried this but it did not work: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1337693
I'm using 10.04 with encrypted home dir. I think the behavior below is wrong:
I can log in as root and change user's password. After that the user can log in using new password, which is normal, but it can also decrypt its home dir using the new password, which is dangerous. Assume I lost my computer. This encrypted home dir will not protect my private data because whoever gets the computer can boot it up with a livecd and chroot to change my user's password and then boot up my system and log in using new password.
Let's begin from the top. I have a relatively new laptop that I've been running Ubuntu on (along with a little-used Windows boot). Picked it up in November or so, installed the current "latest" version of Ubuntu at the time (9.10). I have been doing incremental upgrades, and it's been progressively breaking down more and more. Yes, this includes 10.04.
After GRUB stopped working, I decided it was time to try a reinstall from the top. I told it to leave all the other operating systems alone and do a full reinstall.
Fortunately, I had managed to stuff most of my current work in duplicate locations during this whole debacle, somehow. Don't ask me how I managed to do that when GRUB wasn't working. However, when I installed, I conscientiously said "Oh, yes, Ubuntu, encrypt my home folder! I love privacy!" As a result, about... 30 gigabytes of useful (but ultimately re-downloadable) material is rather inaccessible at the moment. When I try to boot the old system using the newly fixed GRUB, it goes into kernel panic. This seems like a no-go.
I have a saved hojillion-character long passphrase for decryption from my install back in November. Conscientiously saved in the case of just such an emergency.
I read this how-to and followed it to the letter as far as I could tell, trying to mount with ecrytfs to recover my data.
[USERNAME] here is a proxy for my actual username. Yes, the location of my old home folder may seem a little bizarre.
Code: sudo mount -t ecryptfs /media/c82ca9fe-2b15-4aca-a98d-6482b1d80a32/home/[USERNAME]/ /home/[USERNAME]/oldhome Passphrase: Select cipher: 1) aes: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32 (not loaded)
What are the steps I must take to move my existing home folder to a separate, encrypted partition? Can I create this partition without damaging my current partition? Where is a trusted location to download App Armor profiles? What else can I do to harden the security of Ubuntu?
I want to carry Ubuntu with me everywhere on a LiveUSB but I want to encrypt the home with a strong passphrase in case it is lost or stolen. How do I do that?
I would just like to know how to, and know if its secure to run the following programs WHILE LOGGED OUT of Ubuntu: openvpn, deluge, and if it can be securely done while the home directory is encrypted.
I would like to give a few students a preconfigured Ubuntu USB stick with certain apps. I also encrypted the home folder in case of loss.
With TrueCrypt, cloning an encrypted container would be a big no-no because any one could just backup their header with a known pw and use it to decrypt anyone else's container due to each container using the same master key. I assumes the same applies to home folder encryption, yes?
Is there a way, other than creating a new user with home folder encryption, of forcing a master key change?
while since I've been here. I'm having an issue with a fresh install of 11.04. Due to work requirements, I encrypted my home folder, which is fine, however, it seems to randomly lock itself down while I'm working, and it's getting really annoying.
Apps stop working, I can't open nautilus (something about not being able to create certain folders because home is locked), hell, even the terminal link on my desktop says failed to launch application (though the launcher on the top panel works). I just have to run ecryptfs-mount-private and enter my password to fix it, but it's doing this every 15 minutes or so. what might cause it to relock itself so frequently? I would expect to not have to deal with mounting my private data, that should happen at login and be good until log out.
Ubuntu 10.04 (64)I have a second drive (currently mounted as /disk2).I want my home directory (/home/jb) to include this second disk as JUST a separate 'folder' accessible from my home area.want the data on the second disk to be encrypted, (just like my /home/jb folder is now).I would prefer to 'blend' the second drive into my existing setup.I'm looking for the safest way to achieve this, don't mind editing fstab etc. or getting my hands dirty on the cli.
Not using filename encryption when you create a new encrypted folder is easy, but how to disable it in the home encryption that is automatically set up by the Karmic installation CD?
If I wanted to transfer a home folder that was encrypted to another ubuntu computer could I? If I had a separate home partition that was encrypted, but I wanted to upgrade ubuntu to the latest version by doing a clean install is there an easy way so that I can still read the data encrypted with the old version?
I logged in to Recover Mode ("Drop to root shell prompt") this morning to do something. Naturally, I wanted access to my encrypted home folder.
The README file says to run ecryptfs-mount-private. However, that command returns an error: "ERROR: Encrypted private directory is not setup properly."
This cannot be correct, because if I log in normally, I get my home folder without any problem.
How can I access my encrypted home folder when I boot via Recover Mode?
After buying an IBM/Lenovo USB fingerprint reader model FP06 and installing Fingerprint GUI, have problems to mount my home folder encrypted with eCyptfs. I was using it since the first time i install Ubuntu 10.10 64 bits. After login from GDM, there are some ways to make it work:
1) open a terminal window and type ecryptfs-mount-private. This decrypt the home folder, but need to logout and login again to my personal preferences can be reached (bookmarks in nautilus, in firefox, etc). Each time the PC is rebooted, the same process is needed to made again.
2) before login in GDM, change to a tty1 terminal (ctrl-alt-F1) and login from here. The personal folder decrypt then without problems. Then change to GDM (ctrl-alt-F, login an everything works fine. What could be the fault from GDM to not mount the encrypted folder?
I am running ubuntu 11.04 I'd like to encrypt my home folder. - how can it be done, without creating new user/starting from scratch. -I'd like to keep all the files and desktop settings - the only change should be that the folder is encrypted now.
I want to access my hard drive to copy over my old documents. So I boot into a LiveUSB, mount my ubuntu partition, and then cd to my home directory, but I can't open it. I get "permission denied." I encrypted my whole home directory and know the password, but how do I "decrypt" it or login as the partition's root so I can access the documents that way. I'm booted into the USB, but can't access the home directory. I get "You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of 'jake'".
I have two questions regarding auto mount function of Truecrypt. First question:
I want to automatically mount my flash drive encrypted by Truecrypt using a keyfile whenever I plug the drive. How can I do this? I use Ubuntu 10.10.
Second question:
As I do not know the answer of my first question, I currently use following command in a startup script to mount my encrypted flash drive automatically at every system start-up.
My problem with this method is, Truecrypt always search for the drive in the same path saved in favorite drives list, e.g. /dev/sdb1. However sometimes there are more than one flash drive plugged to my computer and my encrypted drive's path changes. In such cases Truecrypt cannot mount my encrypted drive because it cannot find the drive in its path.
As a workaround I tried "auto-mount=devices" parameter. It is slow because it checks every mounted drive, and some of them external hard disk big in size. Moreover it does not recognize any mount point parameter. I'd like to mount the drive to the same mount point every time.
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 64 on my laptop with the entire 500gb setup as encrypted LVM. This has worked well for several months with no problems. During this time i have been backing up the data to an external usb drive (1tb) on a regular basis. The usb drive was not encrypted. So, I thought it would be a good idea to encrypt the backup drive too. I wiped out the backup drive and set it up as one large encrypted lvm and mbr. This seemed to work fine but immediately afterwards I decided to erase that and set it up as encrypted lvm guid instead of mbr. I couldn't delete it while logged into my desktop so i decided to do it from a bootable gparted usb stick. In gparted i erased the 1TB backup drive once again and planned on setting it up the way I wanted once I was logged back into my ubuntu desktop. Now I cant boot into my desktop with the following errors:
cryptsetup: evms_activate is not available b0d) does not begin with /dev/mapper/
Then after waiting for a few minutes I get an error followed by (initramfs)
When booting from a live version of ubuntu the 250MB boot patition is recognized and 500 partion is there but it is labeled as empty/unused.
Also, I did choose to use the exact same passphrase as what is used on the main bootable drive when I set up the encrypted partition on the external 1TB drive.
I've just started using ubuntu one. However, some of the files I store on there are sensitive so I encrypt them using seahorse. Right click, encrypt etc etc. My question is, is there a way to automatically get the encrypt process to delete the un-encrypted file when it makes the new encrypted copy?
When installing the latest Distro of Mint (I believe this is not much different, if at all, from Ubuntu as far as this goes) I chose to have my Home folder encrypted using the login password. This was a function of the installation. What I was wondering about was how secure this was and if I should maybe use something to do a better encryption or not.
I have my home partition encrypted and would like to take the decryption out of the system. Such as when booting the PC it would say it can't find the keys so stop and wait for me to put my usb drive in to continue (reboot and try again). Is there some way to get something like this set up?
