[ale] Encrypted filesystem on netbook

[agrieser at gmail.com (Andrew Grieser)]

For LUKS, what's the feasibility of mounting that from another system?
Also, is there any real difference between encrypted home directory
and "Private" directory (in terms of security) ?

The performance issue on a netbook is why I was interested in
encrypting only the things that need to be encrypted, rather than the
entire drive.

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
> On 11/22/2009 01:22 PM, Andrew Grieser wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> I recently got a small laptop that I will be carrying around quite a bit, and would like to encrypt some files (like ssh keys, pgp keys, firefox stored logins, etc) in case it gets lost or stolen.
>>
>> What is the best way to do this? The Ubuntu alternate cd offers a completely encrypted install, but I've also seen that it offers a "private" folder. Is there a major difference in security between these options?
>>
>> I would also like to be able to mount the drive (in another computer) and decrypt the data in case the laptop dies and I need to get something off of it.
>>
>> If anyone has a setup that works well, I'd be interested to hear about it.
>
> I think the encrypted 'Private' directory is a feature from an older
> version of Ubuntu. What's available now that I know of is
>
> 1) Encrypt everything except /boot at the block layer using LUKS
> 2) Encrypt your entire home directory using the ecryptfs stacked filesystem
>
> The first is only available using the alternative installer. I've used
> the first happily on my Core 2 laptop, first in Ubuntu and now in
> Fedora. I wonder how well either will perform on a cpu-anemic netbook.
>
> --
> All the best,
> Brian Pitts