How to unlock LUKS encrypted partition as normal user?
 

Hi.

I'd like to know if there is a specific way to mount and unlock a LUKS encrypted partition as a normal user?

Right now I have two disks in my PC, one which contains / and /home (let it be sda), and the other which serves as backup (it should be sdb). On sdb I have one specific partition (sdb2) which is LUKS encrypted, and is not automounted at boot. I added sdb2 to fstab as /dev/mapper/luks-a123456-7890-etc with a predefined mount point (which is not the default mount location). This is an ext4 formatted luks partition, and has the noauto,user options in the fstab.

Despite the above mentioned setup, a root password is also asked after I provided the password necessary to unlock the encryption. I'm simply trying to access this partition through dolphin.

Could someone describe how to make it work without a root password? Thanks in advance.

P.S.: I'm using gentoo stable by the way.

The fstab entry mounts the partition without root privileges.
LUKS decrypting need root access.

You can read through the ubuntu wiki for further details.

All right then, I guess I need to look for a way to decrypt the partition without root privileges. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Do I need to be a part of any special type of user group to do that?

Cryptsetup needs root priviledges to access device mapper.