On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 12:28:55AM +0200, nodata wrote: > The default behaviour is that a user must know and supply a passphrase > in order to mount an encrypted volume. This is good: know the > passphrase, you get to mount the volume. > > What I am concerned about is that the volume is mounted for _every_ user > on the system to see. Another option is guestfish which has LUKS support now (in Fedora 14). This works because guestfish runs another Linux kernel as the local user, and you only pass the key to that kernel. The normal user separation of Linux prevents another non-root user from gaining access to the key. As with all of the schemes discussed, root on the machine would still be able to gain access. Local non-root users could also try their hand at exploiting the host kernel -- usually easier to do than a remote exploit -- or looking for some side channel such as keys being leaked through process arguments. Local users + super-secret data is not a great recipe for assured security. Rich. $ guestfish --ro -a F13x64Encrypted.img Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for editing virtual machine filesystems. Type: 'help' for a list of commands 'man' to read the manual 'quit' to quit the shell ><fs> run ><fs> list-partitions /dev/vda1 /dev/vda2 ><fs> luks-open /dev/sda2 encrypted Enter key or passphrase ("key"): ><fs> vgscan ><fs> vg-activate true "" ><fs> lvs /dev/vg_f13x64encrypted/lv_root /dev/vg_f13x64encrypted/lv_swap ><fs> mount-options "" /dev/vg_f13x64encrypted/lv_root / ><fs> ll /home/ total 12 drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Jul 21 12:00 . dr-xr-xr-x. 24 root root 4096 Jul 21 12:01 .. drwx------. 4 500 500 4096 Jul 21 12:00 rjones -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel