dmcrypt, cryptsetup primer,,,

[alonzo fretwell <alonzofretwell@xxxxxxxxx>]

hi,

i am new to disk encryption but i have setup an encrypted netbook using kubuntu 12.10  with the following specs that a kind person at the kubuntu forum has helped me determine...

QUOTE
>From that I can tell you have two partitions on your physical disk, one for boot (sda1) and one encrypted partition (sda5 logical, on an extended partition sda2)

The encrypted partition looks to be 30.6GB big

It also looks like the encrypted partition is split into a 1GB swap space and the root file system in the rest of the space (device file of the root is /dev/mapper/kubuntu-root which is 29.5GB)


(you also have a 32GB sd card pluged in  )

# This is you boot partition, it is on the physical disk and is unencrypted
/dev/sda1: UUID="e218a0d4-97d8-4abe-bed3-5344ed533da0" TYPE="ext2"

# This is partition that is encrypted
/dev/sda5: UUID="d17401b2-b117-4e77-bdc7-6eb4196e05e4" TYPE="crypto_LUKS"

# This is an sdcard
/dev/mmcblk0p1: UUID="44F4-B5A3" TYPE="vfat"

# This sits on top of the encrypted partition to split the encrypted volume up into more partitions :D
/dev/mapper/sda5_crypt: UUID="9YQ0xb-qZf3-NmSm-k8z4-7S2d-Htv0-XuOKt0" TYPE="LVM2_member"

# This is your root drive which sits on one of the LVM2 partitions which sits on the encrypted drive
/dev/mapper/kubuntu-root: UUID="ea3a1e41-827f-420d-b25e-2f592d256fba" TYPE="ext4"

# This is your swap space which also sits on one of the LVM2 partitions which sits on the encrypted drive
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1: UUID="c3e80d02-9c5b-415b-9a9c-e830b4c23e3d" TYPE="swap"


# And this is your home folder which looks to also be encrypted... and sits on the encrypted root partition
/home/alonzo/.Private 28G 5.3G 21G 21% /home/alonzo

The last one is an encrypted file which contains the contents of your home directory, it is mounted when you login and is most likely the "virtual" disk you talk about. This looks like ecryptfs's work to me.

So it looks like you have LVM on whole disk encryption (this is a standard way of doing whole disk encryption) as well as home directory encryption which is kind of redundant with whole disk encryption.

END QUOTE

the linux specs are...

Linux 3.5.0-21-generic, KDE 4.9.4, Hostname eartha,
Grand Unified Bootloader (Grub) 0.97-29ubuntu66 (Legacy version)

working with the command line is no problem. i have used linux for 10 years but only now do i work with encrypted disk volumes, partitions, etc.

if you can direct me to a good primer for someone who has never worked with dm-crypt or cryptsetup i would be grateful.

thank you.

--
-Alonzo

http://alonzofretwell.com
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http://www.facebook.com/AlonzoFretwellCom

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