[sllug-members]: Encrypted Home Directories

[Knight Walker]

On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 13:15 -0700, Morgan Terry wrote:
> Does anyone know what the best way to set up encrypted home
> directories is? I want to do so on my laptop to give my data some
> protection in case the machine is lost or stolen. From my research so
> far, there seem to be several methods used (encrypted loopback,
> dmcrypt, encfs, etc)
> 
> Has anyone here tried doing anything like this? What method(s) did you
> use and what were your impressions of it/them?

I've experimented with this a little, but thus far nothing works quite
as I would like.  The one I ended up using was dmcrypt, mainly because
it's file-system independent, can handle any size, is actively being
maintained and improved, and came with my distro.  However to get it
setup, I had to shut off the graphical boot (So I could put in the
password) and modify my start-up scripts to run the correct command
before it tried to mount /home.  There are ways around having to type in
the password all the time (like having the key on a flash drive), but
that didn't really appeal to me (Since flash drives can be lost, stolen,
or seized).  However from what I've been reading, with the growing
desire for encrypted block devices or file-systems, I wouldn't be
surprised if it doesn't get easier in the next round of distro upgrades.

-KW