This makes a world of difference. I know many people may know of it but may not actually do it. It Protects your files in case your computer is ever stolen and prevents alphabet agencies from just brute forcing into your Laptop or whatever.
I found that Limine (bootloader) has the fastest decryption when paired with LUKS at least for my laptop.
If your computer isn’t encrypted I could make a live USB of a distro, plug it into your computer, boot, and view your files on your hard drive. Completely bypassing your Login manager. If your computer is encrypted I could not. Use a strong password and different from your login
Benefits of Using LUKS with GRUB Enhanced Security
- Data Protection: LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) encrypts disk partitions, ensuring that data remains secure even if the physical device is stolen.
- Full Disk Encryption: It can encrypt the entire disk, including sensitive files and swap space, preventing unauthorized access to confidential information.
Compatibility with GRUB
- Unlocking from Bootloader: GRUB can unlock LUKS-encrypted partitions using the cryptomount command, allowing the system to boot securely without exposing sensitive data.
- Support for LVM: When combined with Logical Volume Management (LVM), LUKS allows for flexible partition management while maintaining encryption.
Pretty much all beginner friendly distros have this thing (Fedora Debian Ubuntu Mint). You just have to enable it. Also make sure if you are using secure boot - remove Microsoft keys and generate your own. Also its nice to have bios password setup too.
Watch out about removing Microsoft’s keys! Some video drivers (nvidia) will only work with Microsoft’s keys and you might brick your system. Only remove Microsoft’s keys if you know what you’re doing.
I did not know this about secure boot, I always just disabled it.
It’s easy-- if you install on a single drive. If you want home on a separate drive, encryption is not so easy, and you have to learn about cryptsetup, crypttab, etc. Quite a steep learning curve compared to the installer. I do hope distros provide better coverage of this in the future. Having home on a separate drive and encrypted is just good practice.
And don’t forget folks: if this drive contains your whole digital identity, make sure your next ones do have the keys. If something happens to you, it is impossible to retrieve logins, photos, whatever your kin/whomever might need from that drive.
Same goes for e.g. homeservers, VPSs or anything your family relies on: tell them where they find the relevant logins and who could possibly help them, if they’re not capable. Grieving is hard enough, if they figure they also lost all memories of the beloved one, that’s terrible.
Seems a lot of distros put it under an advanced section in the installer, but I think the “advanced” option should be not enabling full-disk encryption, meaning you know what you’re doing and have assessed the risk.
Ideally, yes. The problem is that the non-advanced users then get prompted for their encryption key and then it’s “What are you talking about, I never set that up, what do you mean you can’t recover the photos of my grandkids!”
Also: back in the day, you could wipe a drive with GNU Shred or just “dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda”. SSDs and NVMe drives have logic about where and what to overwrite that makes this less effective, leading to the possibility of data recovery from old drives. If the data is always encrypted at rest and the key is elsewhere (not on the drive, in a yubikey or TPM chip or your head), then the data is not recoverable.
Setting up full-disk encryption on a Steam Deck with an on-screen keyboard should definitely be an option during SteamOS installation, but it’s a pain as it stands. It’s my only Linux device not using LUKS.
That’s one of the reasons why I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my Deck. I used unl0kr to put in my passphrase on boot. Unfortunately OpenSUSE removed the framebuffer device and the DRM backend doesn’t work correctly at the moment.
Pointless for gaming devices, nothing to hide on them, there will also be a small overhead for nothing.
I use mine as a computer often. When I travel it stores notes, has my email accounts, and is a productive tool.
So yeah I would like to encrypt it. As it is I use vaults and back up encrypted to my own cloud. But it would be nice to simply do the whole thing.
Ok fair. But most of those tools are cloud based? Then wouldnt have to worry about an overhead lr encryption when the drive fails.
Encryption really is not much overhead with a modern processor.
I do believe the steam deck uses a modern processor with hardware cryptology.
1-3% overhead, last i check couple years ago. No clue now.
Correct, nothing to hide because nobody gets their games from the high seas.
your gaming account may be able to do some damage
I found that Limine (bootloader) has the fastest decryption when paired with LUKS at least for my laptop.
Limine does not have decryption, that’s just the linux kernel.
This makes a world of difference
Yep. Can’t recover /home if you fuck around.
Keep it simple and stupid it is for me. I prefer to encrypt only my sensible files. And the browser runs in volatile memory.
What about data safety, backups etc.? If someone has access to my PC, that is already pretty catastrophic.
They can’t access your files, they just have your computer. They could delete your files by wiping your drive but they don’t have your files, ensuring your privacy
dmcrypt for backup drives. Ideally with detached encryption header, stored separately.
Here is the guide for Fedora: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/encrypting-drives-using-LUKS/
Last time I had LUKS setup on my main laptop, there was a surprizingly sharp hit in performance.
I’m glad I have the option, but is it really the most appropriate thing for me to use right now? It just doesn’t make sense to talk about security and privacy without a clear threat model first.
Sigh. It doesn’t impact performance. That had a had a higher chance of being the type of partition you created. Also, in the PRIVACY group are you really confused about why you want privacy?
The type of partition I created was Debian’s default settings at the time.
This is where the threat modeling comes in. The laptop in question is not currently likely to be physically searched - nor does it contain any data that is likely to put me at any risk if it is searched, and the more prudent things I can be doing to protect my privacy have more to do with getting away from Android/Play Store, and being less dependent on other surveillance-capitalism services like YouTube, Google Maps, etc.
I will likely use LUKS again in the future, but there are broader overhauls I need to make to my digital life first.
Look you don’t need to be searched or expecting a search. If someone steals your laptop you are covered SIGNIFICANTLY more if it’s encrypted which gives you privacy because they wouldn’t be able to see your data. Doesn’t matter if it’s a risk to you. It’s for the privacy. It’s the mindset not just the random act
Currently I have fragments of my data stored on at least half a dozen devices that I’ve accumulated over the years. My digital life is as messy as my adhd brain. I plan on setting up a NAS at some point, and will likely both consolidate all my data there and use LUKS. But until then encrypting one drive is the least of my problems.
Although anti-theft tech in my laptop might be kind of neat.
What kind of CPU is in that laptop? The vast majority of x86 CPUs from the past 10 years include hardware acceleration for AES encryption so that the performance hit is negligible.
It’s a Thinkpad P51 with a Xeon chip of some sort. Yeah I don’t know what happened there, only that switching to fedora without full disk encryption has resulted in much greater performance, like a difference between being able to do some gaming or not. So many variable changed there that I don’t even know if the crypto had anything to do with it.
arch linux was what forced me to use LUKS on all of my installs regardless of distros, btw.
i used the standard layout:/boot, /, /home, swap. So when the installs break, the best way to fix is to use the archiso and remount and re arch-chroot.
Well… i found out that without LUKS, anybody can use any distros live cd and mount my stuff.
At first, I used LUKs only on the main partitions: so / and /home, or just / if no separate /home. Swap remains unencrypted. Boot is also unencrypted.
You could encrypt those too but need more work and hackery stuff:
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encrypted boot: can be slow if you boot the compututer from cold. There’s also this thing where you need to enter the password twice => think Fedora has an article to get around this. Iirc, it involves storing the boot’s encrypted password as a key deep within the root directory.
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encrypted swap: the tricky thing is to use this with hibernation. I managed to get it to work once but with Zram stuff, I dont use hibernation anymore. It involved writing the correct arguments in the /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Basically tells the bootloader to hibernate and resume from hibernation with the correct UUID.
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I wanna encrypt my BTRFS system, but not the FAT32 boot part. Only the Linux kernels are on FAT32 anyway, and I don’t care about encrypting those — they’re public stuff, not private files. I just let limine-entry-tool hash them to make sure they’re clean for booting, that’s totally fine for me.
I don’t like putting kernels on the Linux filesystem for GRUB — it just makes booting slower and causes random issues.
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You can have your machine unencrypt using the TPM module, have a look at clevis for example. Once you’ve got it set up you can pretty much forget it’s there.
This makes a world of difference
Yep. Can’t recover /home if you fuck around.
Keep it simple and stupid it is for me. I prefer to encrypt only my sensible files. And the browser runs in volatile memory.
Encfs + pam mount home.
/tmp and var/run in tmpfs
No swap.
