Automating backups to an encrypted drive

[Richard England]

John Summerfield wrote:
> lanas wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>>   I'd like to automate periodic backups to an encrypted drive.  The
>> drive is in fact a removable USB drive.  It's fairly easy, if needed,
>> to write a Perl script that would use expect and feed the password
>> needed to mount the encrypted drive but, is there any way to prevent
>> using a plain text password in any kind of script whatsoever ?  I'm
>> using dm-crypt, but I could change to another encryption mechanism.
>
> I don't understand what you want to do. Can you expand?
>
>
>
>
I'm not much help in this area but I think the OPs issue is having a 
script with an embedded password.  If the script has to sudo or su to 
the correct environment to mount the drive and/or perform the backup to 
a drive with the encryption scheme the password would be in plain text 
and therefore compromised.

Is there any way in which running this as a user cron job might be 
useful?  Could cron start a job as a user with the proper access rights?

I've said more than I know, I'll bow out now.

~~R