Encrypt /home and USB-memory
 

Hi,

1) I would like to encrypt /home, what would be a simple approach to do this?, the algorithm does'nt really matter, but I want it more secure than e.g. DES.

2) Also I would like to encrypt my USB-memory, I am using FAT32 on that memory because I want to be able to read it from Windows as well. Is it possible to encrypt it so I will be able to unencrypt it in Linux and as well in Windows?

Thanks,
- Johan

With reference to the first question, you could use cryptoloop or CFS an NFS wrapper, there
is a good howto here http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Cryptoloop-HOWTO/.

Regards

Thanks, I will try it out
- Johan

Thanks mattLSO for the tip, it turned out that cryptoloop is depreciated in krn 2.6.11 and you should now go for dm-crypt instead. I have tried it on my memorystick and it worked fine with ext3 and everything.
As dm-crypt is a device-mapper thing I have to load the following before I can mount the encrypted filesystem:

'cryptsetup create sda1 /dev/sda1' (I have to give my password at this stage)
and then 'mount /dev/mapper/sda1 /mnt/usbkey'

and the following to umount:

'umount /mnt/usbkey'
'cryptsetup remove sda1'

Now I want to try this out for my /home, but I have to run the cryptsetup thing before mount and after umount. I can put "/dev/mapper/sda1 /mnt/usbkey" in /etc/fstab, but what about the cryptsetup thing (that prompts me for my password). Where could I put the line to make it happen at the right time (before mount of /home and after umount of /home)

Thanks!,
- Johan

Hey in fstab on the line of the /home add this Example:

This will prevent it from being mounted on boot then in (On Debian, redhat is /etc/rc.d/init.d) /etc/init.d/ create a script called docrypto to run the commands, chmod 755 it then

This will load your crypto commands on boot, as for unmounting when init changes runlevel on shutdown or reboot it calls the script with stop, just make sure it has the following format.

Hopefully this will put you on the right path

Regards