Simplified Disk Encryption Coming to GNOME

An anonymous reader writes "David Zeuthen of Red Hat has been working on adding encrypted volume support to HAL. The result is an infrastructure that is being developed to make working with encrypted volumes easier. David has published a screenshot documenting his work on his blog. The bottom line: attach a properly encrypted volume and the system will prompt you for a password and automatically mount it."

TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt [truecrypt.org] has offered this type of integration in Linux for years.

Re:TrueCrypt

Mac OS X's DMG disk image format has had similar functionality (AES-128) for a long time too, but admittedly it is not cross-platform and open-source like TrueCrypt is.

Re:TrueCrypt

It's one of my favorite programs, but TrueCrypt was Windows only until it was ported to Linux 4 months ago. Not exactly what I'd call "years".

The Linux version is also a command-line program (or at least everything I've read on it have indicated as such). Integrating the same features into a nice interface would be a welcomed addition to the Gnome desktop.

Disk encryption?

Won't everyone (ie Government entities) complain that Linux is now a haven for terrorists and pedophilles since only a criminal would want to encrypt their [disk|phone call|email|http connection]?

For tech-savvy users there's already been solution

These developments will bring file security to many non-technical users, but for the nerds out there there have already been practical solutions for some time.

I've been keeping the hard disk of my Linux encrypted with twofish for over three years now (see the description of this encryption method in Bruce Schneier's magisterial Applied Cryptography [amazon.com] ). Swap is encrypted with a random key generated on each boot-up. At first I used the old cryptoloop method, but as soon as the kernel support was there I switched to the crypto device-mapper target [saout.de]. I never noticed any performance penalties: this is a very efficient solution.

Already in debian

Debian already has encryption, and it's very convenient.

Install lvm2 (great for managing disk space), dmsetup, cryptsetup. Read this page [riseup.net] and follow its instructions.

You can create a block device of any size you want using lvm (so long as there is sufficient disk space of course) and then map that to another block device using the device mapper and the crypt filter. The original block device looks like random bytes and if you get the passphrase wrong the mapped block device still looks like random bytes (i.e. there's no way to confirm a correct passphrase except that the result looks sensible).

Once you have set a passphrase, make a filesystem on the mapped block device. Go ahead and use it any way you like.

Re:Already in debian

Obviously you didn't read the whopping 3 paragraphs and look at the screenshot that makes it quite clear that what they're doing is making it actually easy to use an encrypted filesystem from a desktop GUI. The instructions you post don't integrate into the desktop, nor are they by any means easy, sorry.

Too confusing for consumers ?

an infrastructure that is being developed to make working with encrypted volumes easier

Maybe the new version will be called GNOME_PRO and the old will be GNOME_HOME edition?

I think my information is safe enough without it

Nobody else at my home uses Linux, and if they tried to do anything other than click on the shortcuts to Firefox or VLC or the random game like America's Army or Unreal Tournament, they wouldn't have any a very good idea of what to do. The same goes for when I'm at school. I know of nobody that uses Linux or knows how to use Linux (save for one persone I met once while at an engineering orientation during the summer,) so I'm pretty sure that if I want anything hidden, I'll store it in a folder labled .DON\'T\ LOOK\ HERE\ BECAUSE\ IT\ IS\ A\ SECRET! and place it in ~/Desktop/

Re:I think my information is safe enough without i

I heard a fascinating report [npr.org] on NPR this morning about how even though so many options for email and file encryption are coming available, very few people actually use them. Even the big privacy advocates who encourage people to use encryption, it turns out, don't use encryption very much. I think a large part of it is because people don't actually think their data is worth encrypting. The other part of it is that the infrastructure is not ubiquotous enough or simple enough to make it worthwhile for everyday use.

In any case, the story is definitely worth a listen.

Portability?

I'm looking forward to use this with NetBSD's CGD.

  - Hubert

great news

What would be cooler is a nice GUI to create encrypted volumes

HAL != Gnome

The summary and headline are misleading. HAL is a desktop independant technology and is also used heavily KDE in 3.4, and will likely be even more so in KDE 4.0.

This is a not a GNOME-centric development.

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

HAL is not part of a desktop (not really sure why Gnome is mentioned here, other that that the initial user tools for this is Gnome based). It's a Hardware Abstraction Layer around the kernel to support stuff like hotplugging, file monitoring and so on in a nice, hardware-independent manner. It sounds like just about the right level to me. Isn't HAL used in most recent distros by now, no matter what desktop (if any)?

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

I dont know what you're talking about and I'm thinking it's because you don't either.

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

Would have you read the article instead trying to do a FP, you would see that this is the same as automonting an USB disk.

From TFA: While LUKS is a standard on-disk format, there is also a reference implementation. LUKS for dm-crypt is implemented in an enhanced version of cryptsetup.

I guess dm-crypt is the right layer for that, done in the kernel by the device mapper. This only will ask you for you key before mounting it.

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

KDE does something similar, shoehorning in an ssh filesystem that only works in K-apps. There's a userspace sshfs which I'm going to try since I don't use K much, but this is all unnecessary duplication of effort.

But I can't see that GNOME is the essential ingredient here, if it's done in HAL, Gnome just needs a nice GUI to handle a password request.

Don't panic!

It's just an automounter and passphrase dialog that uses the DM-Crypt (plus LUKS, which is DM-Crypt, but keeps the DM-Crypt configuration in the device's first block rather than /etc)

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

Don't worry, the article title is just a bit misleading. All this really is is hooks being built into HAL (dynamic hardware framework) so that users can mount crypted filesystems with a pretty frontend.

What you're saying is like saying "My OS shouldn't ask me with a GUI bubble what to do with a memory stick. That's part of the filesystem layer. Much lower layer than the GUI."

This isn't using gnomevfs.

And when it comes to building 'secondary' VFSs, there's a good argument for keeping things out of the kernel. It's supposed to be a unix kernel, not a plan9 kernel.

Re:They're not writing a new file system..

Also notice his screenshot still shows the USB key not being mounted 'sync'. Sigh. That so needs changed. One thing at a time I guess. :)

Actually the new thing is the 'flush' mount option that don't wear out flash drives and destroys performance like 'sync' does. Someone at SUSE wrote an experimental 'flush' patch for vfat and it seems possible to do for other file systems too. It will go upstream and some point...

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

Nothing is being done at that level, RTFA or learn how HAL actually works. The encryption is handled in the kernel by device mapper, and a userspace tool (cryptsetup) activates it. This project is just a front-end to that, so you don't have to run cryptsetup from a terminal yourself. Once it's mounted any normal app can interact with it like any otherpart of the file system, just like HAL-mounted removable disks.

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

I'm going to try to correct you as gently as I can (So unlike Slashdot, I know). But it's done this way to make it compatible. The crypto is at the level it is so it is FS agnostic (I'm using it now on top of LVM and underneath ReiserFS).

In other words, it's at the block level, not the FS level. It creates no problems for anything using the "standard" Linux APIs because unless they're working on the block level, they won't even know it's there.

The user is not locked out of the data unless the user forgets the password while mounting the device/file/partition/LV. Once it's mounted, the key is retained in the kernel and life goes on. It can present problems in using it for system-level filesystems (/home, /usr, etc) but that's something the distro maintainers will have to tackle since you will either need to be present when the system boots (to type in the key) or have it grab the key from an unencrypted location accessible to the system (Some people use remote servers, some us USB drives, whatever).

This is perfect for removable drives (USB, FireWire, etc).

Poor article title

The GNOME in the title of the article refers to the GUI component for interacting with the HAL file system encryption component. They're just making a GUI to interact with the system-level encryption.