Hello,

I just installed the testing version of Debian with the option to setup encrypted home directories. I used a passphrase that I now want to change to something else. How do I do that?

Is your account password being used as the passphrase for the encryption key? If so, just use the passwd command.

The passphrase is different from my password.

I miss informed in my earlier post (it was late for me) it is not only the home directory that is protected by the passphrase but the root '/' directory. Booting the machine stops for me to type in the passphrase. This is good and is what I want ... but now I realize that my passphrase could be guessed a lot easier than I thought ... so i want to change it.

Assuming Debian uses cryptsetup for this, you can use cryptsetup luksAddKey and cryptsetup luksRemoveKey. See man cryptsetup.

Thanks ... that helped me get the crappy passphrase changed.

The process was to add the new passphrase, test it, remove the old passphrase:

That asked me for the existing passphrase which I provided and then enter my new passphrase twice. I rebooted and provided this new passphrase to make sure it worked. I rebooted once again and provided the old passphrase and that worked as well.

I provided my old passphrase (the one I wanted to remove) and then had to provide my 'remaining' (new) passphrase for confirmation.

Thanks for your help