securing linux HDD mounting with magic number ??

Bluesuperman · 11-22-2004, 01:03 PM

Hello,

I read some where that with FreeBSD you can secure a hard drive with some type of magic number. This would make it so if an attacker stole the whole PC they would be unable to remove the hard drive and access it by mounting it from another system. The same would be true if they tried to access it with a bootable CD.

Is this possible with a linux OS or is this simple a FreeBSD feature ???

I would like to make it so no one can simple boot with a CD and change the root password.

Thanks.

Michael.

unSpawn · 11-27-2004, 07:52 AM

This would make it so if an attacker stole the whole PC they would be unable to remove the hard drive and access it by mounting it from another system.
What you want is filesystem encryption. Lotsa choices. I don't use stego, slackspace writing or any other form of "hiding" data or "exotic" stuff and I don't use full drive encryption. For daily use I use a mix of SSL and PGP in combination with EncFS/FUSE on servers and laptops.

I would like to make it so no one can simple boot with a CD and change the root password.
Open casing, remove drive, put drive in other box and examine drive.
Of course with proper encryption it will be much harder if not impossible to retrieve usable data...