Encryption: August 2008 Archives
Encrypted private directories are the one thing that would get me to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 this October. Ubuntu's Dustin Kirkland explains it all:
How does it work?The underlying technology is a cryptographic virtual filesystem in the Linux kernel called eCryptfs, authored by Michael Halcrow of IBM.
When a user logs into an Ubuntu Intrepid system, their login passphrase is automatically used to decrypt a randomly generated mount passphrase. This mount passphrase will then cryptographically mount ~/.Private onto ~/Private. As long as ~/Private is mounted, the user can read and write sensitive data to files and directories under the virtual filesystem on ~/Private. The actual files stored in the underlying filesystem are encrypted, and located in ~/.Private. The only passphrase required is obtained when logging in (via console, ssh, gdm, etc). And the only files encrypted are those that the user consciously places in ~/Private. The user can then incrementally backup the encrypted ~/.Private directory to off-site storage.
I'd really, really, really like to see a backport of this to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS so I can keep the current version of the distro if I so choose.
I'll be looking at Ubuntu Backports and GetDeb to see if installing it in Hardy is possible. ... or I may just upgrade to Intrepid.
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