encrypted booting
 

hello everybody...iam new to linux programming....i hv to do the encrypted booting in linux......by the way what does encrypted booting means?
can anybody plzz help me regarding this topic...

encrypted booting means the boot process will ask for a password. Without this password you will not be able to find anything on the hard disk (no files, no dirs, no os, no partitions, it will look like just a huge amount of random data)

thankx... by the way how do we exactly do encryption of linux...i mean to say wat kind of program do we use in it...any site where i can find it???...

I think there are several possibilities. In our company we use Check Point EndPoint Security (but it is not free). It does not take care about the OS, this software encrypts the I/O access to the hard disk.

is der any other possibilities where i can get the encrypton of linux done...

just google
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/En...ilesystemHowto
http://www.goudkov.com/public/articl...partitions.jsp
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-enc...debian-squeeze

hey thnx so much...

hi everybdy, i got one more problem..
i am trying to encrypt a whole partition through truecrypt and now i want to automount tht partition during reboot. During reboot it should ask for the key and automount that partition. i hv tried by changing the fstab file in /etc but its stil showing some error during reboot. i am not able to automount it during reboot......can anybody help me in this case????

Well if you tell us the error we might be able to but that's pretty vague.

If you are trying to do full disk encryption (ie including the root partition) you can't using Truecrypt in Linux. You'll need to use LUKS or dm-crypt.

thanx nyteowl.......i was able to encrypt the full hard disk using luks and dm-crypt....thanx a lot

now i am having an another problem...after encrypting i made a distribution of it...in the end i made its iso image and wrote it on a CD and tried to install in another system....aftr installation, its just starting like a normal operating system(its not asking for any passphrase or password in the beginning in the way i encrypted it initially).....how can it b done?

how can a system be fully encrypted while the OS is being installed( ubuntu 11.10)...it should be like how an ubuntu 11.10 alternate installer works...how can the system hard disk can be encrypted while the OS is being installed?

It sounds like you had your encrypted filesystem decrypted and mounted, and created an image of the decrypted (/dev/dm-*) device(s) instead of the encrypted (/dev/sd*) device(s). Look in /dev/mapper/. There are symbolic links such as /dev/mapper/cr_sda2 -> /dev/dm-1. Here /dev/sda2 is encrypted. The kernel maps a decrypted device to /dev/dm-2, and this is the device that is mounted, and used during an installation.

I use LUKS at home. A previous post said that you needed LUKS to encrypt the entire partition, instead of TrueCrypt. This is backwards. You need an unencrypted /boot partition to be able to load the kernel including the parts which can decrypt the rest of the drive. Truecrypt uses it's own unstandard boot loader to enable full drive encrypting. I use LUKS because it allows me to decrypt a partition using cryptsetup without depending on a third party program.

The /boot partition is small, and you could easily create an image backup and save it on read-only media such as a CDROM or DVD-ROM. The /boot partition is also needed outside an LVM image and all RAID versions other than mirroring (RAID-1).

i was able to encrypt my system with LUKS by entering into an unencrypted partition...bt the prblem tht is occuring rite now is tht i am not able to customize this into a boot CD(the linux OS shud encrypt the entire hard disk while being installed into the system)...i have used REMASTERSYS bt its nt working....plzz suggest how shud i go abt it....thanku