"RR" == Ralf Ronneburger writes:
RR> Michel Messerschmidt wrote: >> For example, encrypted filesystems are almost always useful to prevent >> data leakage from abandoned hardware (think of all the harddisks sold >> on ebay). >> Also any file encrypted by a user improves the security by reducing the >> time the data is accessible and subject to attacks. >> RR> For harddisk encryption on servers this is senseless. Well, IMHO that view sounds a little over-simplifying to me. Pls imagine this scenario: Somebodys steals your disks for searching them. E.g. the taxman ;-) Of course, as soon as the partitions in question are luksClose'd or simply unplugged or whatever, my disk are apparently just unreadable to the thief. But if the thief listens *here* and he knows, I am using luks, and if he proceeds a little more clever therefore, and he finds a way to look at my luksOpen'ed partitions, apparently with luks he is able to read out my plain keys from the luks partition. I regard this a sort of backdoor (rather a giant gate than a tiny little backdoor) not a traditional one, but still a way to conquer my data. The way I currently mount my encrypted external disk through a loop device on a twofish256/sha512'ed partition (i.e. on a non-luksified system), I have been sure so far, that my key is not stored in a way similar to how luks does it. RR> The disk is always online RR> (therefore not protected) Well, ..., alright, as long as the disk is online, there may be a way to gain access to it even to dis-allowed users. But this illegal access should not easily enable the thief, to read out keys for later usage "at home", the taxman's computer lab, or wherever. RR> and before you sell it on ebay Well, in the scenario described above I got robbed "asynchronously" (that is the nature of robbing), so I did not have the opportunity of doing so: RR> you can always use some tool RR> to overwrite it with random data. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-security+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-security+help@opensuse.org