Re: need some feedback please

[Phil H <philtickle200@xxxxxxxxx>]

Applications can write data of one sort or another to /tmp and configuration files and so on to /etc (and of course swap), or perhaps (clandestinely or not) to some other place that you don't expect.  Also, the filesystem remembers when progs and files were last accessed and metadata gets stored in the journal for eg ext3 filesystems.  It's perhaps a good thing that the journal gets rapidly overwritten during normal use.

You could run lsof on everything to find out what files are being opened and written to, but the easier way to be 100% sure that data (or information about your data) is not being written in plaintext somewhere is to:

1) Encrypt the whole filesystem and swap, or
2) Run a livecd without swap and write no unencrypted data to your hard drive.

In some ways (2) may be preferable since all you have then is an encrypted partition, which, as I understand it, is effectively impossible to distinguish from a randomly shredded
 partition.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
rodger ellis <rellis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>  Hello 
>
>  I don't see the point in encrypting / if you put all your personal data on the /home partition. Then / contains just the operating system, and that's nothing someone who steals your computer would be interested in.
> Is my thinking correct here?
> -- 
>
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> -
> Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
> Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/

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