Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (1165 mails)

[mhilzinger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Marcel Hilzinger)]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 11:58:53AM +0100, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> 
> FYI, here're the minutes from our discussion.  I hope to see this for
> 10.3...
> 
> Andreas
> 
> Topic: Encrypted Home Directories
> 
> * Main new feature: Per user encrypted home
> 
> * Proposal:
>   - Enable per user encrypted home partitions (using pam_mount)
>   - use dm-crypt + LUKS as default instead of cryptoloop
> 
> Challenges + Problems:
> 
> * currently KDM accesses home directory before authentification (after
>   user name is known) to get information about the last session.  An
>   encrypted home partition this needs changes in the logic.
What about encrypting ~/Documents only per default? Other diretories
could be added by the user easily.

Mandriva has a very smart way and a nice gui. The encrypted folder is
loopmounted over the same folder. So you have

/home/joe/secret (which is a dm-crypt container)
/home/joe/secret (which shows the unencrypted content after giving the
right password.

Ideally Konqueror/Nautilus should ask automatically for a passphrase, when clicking on an encrypted container.

Of course it would be nicer to have full /home encrypted.

> 
> * For ssh-key it's a problem to read the key files since they are
>   stored in the home directory, only password authentification would
>   work.
> 
> * Other programs might read the homedirectory, like procmail.  We have
>   to check which other programs do this and decide how to handle this,
>   e.g. a shadow home directory (or union filesystems) for procmail,
>   secret keys...
> 
> * Backup software is a challenge, users want encrypted backups.
> 
> * Manually mounting via /etc/fstab is not possible currently with
>   dm-crypt, other distributions use /etc/fscrypttab or we would need
>   to extra add support to allow this with /etc/fstab.
> 
>   Use-case: A separate encrypted partition with secrect data that is
>   only mounted manually if needed by the user and then unmounted
>   again.
> 
> * On-the-fly upgrade would be fine.  Unfortunately dm-crypt uses two
>   extra blocks so this cannot be done without losing data.
> 
> * 10.2 has all the basic support for dm-crypt and LUKS but it's not
>   integrated.
> 
> * Linux only supports only 255 loopback mounts, so this limits the
>   maximum of users that can be logged in at the same time.
> 
> * FUSE and encrypted single files would be an option as well but there
>   are some drawbacks with it.
> 
> * Use case: Laptop stolen or taken away.  If one user is comprimised,
>   not all should be comprised.
> 
> * Masterkey that is encrypted by the users login, so that only one
>   password is needed to login.
> 
> * screensaver issues (just close the lid)
>   What happens with a locked screen and laptop taken away still running?
> 
> * suspend to disk
>   How to handle suspend to disk? Umount before suspend and remount later?
> 
> Changes for this:
> 
> YaST changes:
> * support dm-crypt by default for new installations in yast2-storage
> * during user creation allow creation of encrypted home directories
> * During update: Support old cryptoloop partitions and allow new
>   installations.
> 
> Base system changes:
> * Using pam_mount
> * Enable dm-crypt in boot.crypto
> * Handle /etc/fstab unless to not regress
> * Migration programs to migrate from cryptoloop to dm-crypt
> 
> 
> Andreas
> -- 
>  Andreas Jaeger, aj@xxxxxxx, http://www.suse.de/~aj/
>   SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
>    GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F  FED1 389A 563C C272 A126


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