Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-security (35 mails)

[Jochen+opensuse-security@xxxxxxxxxx]

> > > > > "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. 
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