Fedora Core 6 Disk Encryption

Here’s how to set up an encrypted disk and swap partition on Fedora 6. Refer to Disk encryption in Fedora: Past, present and future for more information. For RedHat (RHEL 4) or CentOS 4, refer to http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/EncryptedFilesystem.

Warning: I have no idea how to set up encrypted disks in combination with LVM. I tend to shy away from LVM because it’s yet another layer of abstraction, making it difficult to recover a broken system. However, the following links may be of help: [1], [2].

In these examples, I’m encrypting the /home partition located on partition /dev/sda5, and the swap partition located on /dev/sda3. The partitions will be different on your system.

Create and Format Encrypted Disk

Before you start, you may want to obliterate the partition that will hold the encypted file system:

$ shred /dev/sda5

Setup the crypt disk:

  # You must type "YES" to proceed
  # It will prompt you for a passphrase twice
$ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 home
$ mkfs.ext3 -L /home /dev/mapper/home
$ cryptsetup luksClose home

Create /etc/crypttab

Create the /etc/crypttab file. It should be formatted as follows:

swap    /dev/sda3       /dev/urandom swap,cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256
home    /dev/sda5       none    luks

Edit /etc/fstab

/dev/mapper/home        /home                   ext3    defaults 2 1
/dev/mapper/swap        swap                    swap    defaults 0 0

Whenever you boot the system, it will prompt you for your passphrase for the /home partition.