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.