FC9 boot hangs with encrypted filesystems

Tim Largy tim.largy at gmail.com
Fri Jun 27 02:03:47 UTC 2008


> I'm also still hoping for an answeer. Or suggestion. I was told in a chat
> that it wasn't a bug because it was intended to work that way. Guess I can't
> report it as a bug. :-(
>
> Kind of make LUKS impractical for anything but dedicated personal use, and I
> was hoping to allow on demand mounting of proprietary data.

I've been using cryptsetup with the LUKS extension (i.e. cryptsetup
that ships with Fedora) for a couple of years now for an encrypted
volume that I would mount on-demand. It's still possible to do that.
See my "FC3 encrypted filesystem femto-howto" posting in this list. As
you point out, the Fedora installer isn't supporting our use-case for
encrypted file systems, but it's not a bug.

It's worth thinking about this more. My reason for wanting to mount my
encrypted volume on-demand is to keep sensitive data that I need
occasionally (but not continually) away from an attacker who
compromises my machine over the network. If I detect the compromise
*before* the next time I mount my encrypted volume, my
defense-in-depth has worked. But if I don't detect the compromise, and
type in my passphrase, the attacker has it and my data.

>From the above, it seems that mounting encrypted volumes on-demand is
a reasonable use-case. Any problem with my reasoning?

Tim




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