Mr. Warfield: Hmm, Very interesting! I Intend to pursue that avenue and see if I can construct such a thing. I will most likely begin using CD-RWs, but I was interested in where to get business card CDRs anyway, so I do totally appreciate the information. Very Respectfully, Stuart Blake Tener, IT3, USNR-R, N3GWG Beverly Hills, California VTU 1904G (Volunteer Training Unit) stuart@xxxxxxxxxxx west coast: (310)-358-0202 P.O. Box 16043, Beverly Hills, CA 90209-2043 east coast: (215)-338-6005 P.O. Box 45859, Philadelphia, PA 19149-5859 Telecopier: (419)-715-6073 fax to email gateway via www.efax.com (it's free!) JOIN THE US NAVY RESERVE, SERVE YOUR COUNTRY, AND BENEFIT FROM IT ALL. All commentary made in public email lists, usenet news groups, website forums, or other such forums, exclusive of email conversations begun outside of such a forum is (C)(P) Stuart Tener, unless otherwise clearly the work of another (i.e. quotations of another's email or usenet comments). Such quotations and any copyrights afforded them are the property of the person being quoted. Emails and notices published in a public forum are sometimes presumed to be in the public domain. My comments are copyrighted, I am choosing to publish them for free, however noticing you that I am desirous of retaining all other copyright rights as protected under appropriate US and International copyright law. In the spirit of promoting engineering and intellectual enrichment, you may quote me absent specific permission as long as my commentary is quoted in full and its entirety. Saturday, October 06, 2001 8:05 PM -----Original Message----- From: Michael H. Warfield [mailto:mhw@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 10:40 AM To: IT3 Stuart B. Tener, USNR-R Cc: Hank Leininger; linux-crypto@xxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: encrypting the whole disk / all the data On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 09:49:32AM -0700, IT3 Stuart B. Tener, USNR-R wrote: > Mr. Leininger: > Now this idea has some merit! How would one make such a CD? For me, I would > wish such a CD to have both a patched version of the Kernel as well as being > inclusive of loop-aes code. Any ideas what the design specifications for > such a disc would be? > I have never made even an unencrypted bootable CD for Linux, but would love > to know how to do so, for purposes of protecting my files and forcing an > encrypted boot environment. There are several such projects including the LNX-BBC (Linux Bootable Business Card) project which has several links to several others. LNX-BBC is an outgrowth of the LinuxCare Rescue BBC which still exists at LinuxCare. There is also the Linux-PLAC (Portable Linux Auditing CD). http://www.lnx-bbc.org http://www.sourceforge.org/projects/cdbased http://innominate.org/~pape/rescueCD/ http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ http://open-projects.linuxcare.com/BBC http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/superrescue/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/plac/ And that's just a few examples... All can be readily modified. Business Card sized and shaped CD-Rs can be had for about $.50 USD each in quantities of 100 from a couple of media suppliers. I bought a stack of 100 (with sleaves) for $49.00 (plus way too much shipping) a couple of months ago. They hold about 50Meg uncompressed. With the cloop, compressed loopback file system, most of the BBCs have about 150 Meg of software on them. My preference is to use a combination of one of the above BBCs, modified for my encryption of choice, and then store the keys on a smart-card or Smart-Media card and encrypt the whole damn drive. Then you have to have the boot CD plus the Smart-Media card plus any optional password to boot the system up at all. SmartCards and Smart-Media cards fit in a wallet real nice and the BBC's fit in a shirt pocket. > Very Respectfully, > Stuart Blake Tener, IT3, USNR-R, N3GWG > Beverly Hills, California > VTU 1904G (Volunteer Training Unit) > stuart@xxxxxxxxxxx > west coast: (310)-358-0202 P.O. Box 16043, Beverly Hills, CA 90209-2043 > east coast: (215)-338-6005 P.O. Box 45859, Philadelphia, PA 19149-5859 > > Telecopier: (419)-715-6073 fax to email gateway via www.efax.com (it's > free!) > > JOIN THE US NAVY RESERVE, SERVE YOUR COUNTRY, AND BENEFIT FROM IT ALL. > > Saturday, October 06, 2001 9:44 AM > > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-linux-crypto@xxxxxxxxxxxx > [mailto:owner-linux-crypto@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Hank Leininger > Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 9:45 AM > To: linux-crypto@xxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: encrypting the whole disk / all the data > > On 2001-10-05, Marc Mutz <Marc.Mutz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Friday 05 October 2001 05:07, Antti Koskimäki wrote: > > > Simple question: How do I guarantee that not a single bit of my > > > essential data is written non-crypted on my Linux (laptop-)box ? > [snip] > > > Then root-filesystem. > > > What for? Multiple GB's of almost-known plaintext encrypted under a > > single key just makes it easier for an attacker. You should only > > encrypt what's secret. Your /usr surely isn't! > > Not speaking for Antti, but I'm concerned not just with "someone could > steal the hard drive out of my laptop" but also "someone could steal the > hard drive out of my laptop, trojan some important binaries in any > non-encrypted partitions I have, then put it back, waiting for me to use it > again and leak key material, run privileged tools while the encrypted > filesystems are mounted, etc, and then steal it again." > > To provide at least some protection from that, you need some assurance of > the integrity of, basically, everything. Plaintext /boot and encrypted > everything else still isn't good enough, as the kernel / initrd could be > swapped out by a malicious party. So, boot off a write-once CDROM with > your handwriting on it (and/or which you carry seperate from the > laptop--the business-card CDs would be good for this) and encrypt > *everything* on the hard drive. Wouldn't hurt to also do fscks and md5sum > checking of system binaries after the hard drive is losetup, too, since > though they may not be able to do much they can surely scribble over > things. > > -- > Hank Leininger <hlein@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Then, of course, you're still trusting your BIOS, keyboard, EM > radiation... Mike -- Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@xxxxxxxxxxxx (The Mad Wizard) | (678) 463-0932 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it! Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
