The other day, I got myself a new laptop, all is well and good with it
running Ubuntu Dapper.
I saw a article in Linux Format about encrypting the hard drive. I did
follow it closely, but was unable to make it work. This was probably due
to me trying to encrypt / instead of something like /home so I gave up.
But I do wish to try again. I've just downloaded OpenSUSE 10.1, which
gives the option to encrypt during the installation.
It [the OpenSUSE install] seems to work pretty well, especially if
you're just a single user, you can set a nice long password for /home,
and it will ask for the passphrase during start-up, which I was very
happy with. But it's got me wondering.
Exactly how secure is this? Let's say I can use either OpenSUSE 10.1 or
Ubuntu Dapper .. Say someone steals my laptop. Is it possible they will
ever get hold of my data (ie. decrypt it)? Should I be encrypting more
than just /home? (I was thinking about /tmp -- but I don't want to keep
entering in loads of passphrases on every boot). Is it possible to
encrypt / at all? That would be very handy, then it's just one
passphrase, and I know that everything is secure, but I know I can
expect a performance hit with this (which is not important).
Cheers,
Richard.