Simplified Disk Encryption Coming to GNOME

An anonymous reader writes "David Zeuthen of Red Hat has been working on adding encrypted volume support to HAL. The result is an infrastructure that is being developed to make working with encrypted volumes easier. David has published a screenshot documenting his work on his blog. The bottom line: attach a properly encrypted volume and the system will prompt you for a password and automatically mount it."

Comments

Re:Wrong level of the Stack

[JanneM]

HAL is not part of a desktop (not really sure why Gnome is mentioned here, other that that the initial user tools for this is Gnome based). It's a Hardware Abstraction Layer around the kernel to support stuff like hotplugging, file monitoring and so on in a nice, hardware-independent manner. It sounds like just about the right level to me. Isn't HAL used in most recent distros by now, no matter what desktop (if any)?

For tech-savvy users there's already been solution

[CRCulver]

These developments will bring file security to many non-technical users, but for the nerds out there there have already been practical solutions for some time.

I've been keeping the hard disk of my Linux encrypted with twofish for over three years now (see the description of this encryption method in Bruce Schneier's magisterial Applied Cryptography ). Swap is encrypted with a random key generated on each boot-up. At first I used the old cryptoloop method, but as soon as the kernel support was there I switched to the crypto device-mapper target. I never noticed any performance penalties: this is a very efficient solution.

Re:TrueCrypt

[MBGMorden]

It's one of my favorite programs, but TrueCrypt was Windows only until it was ported to Linux 4 months ago. Not exactly what I'd call "years".

The Linux version is also a command-line program (or at least everything I've read on it have indicated as such). Integrating the same features into a nice interface would be a welcomed addition to the Gnome desktop.

Re:Already in debian

[Omega Hacker]

Obviously you didn't read the whopping 3 paragraphs and look at the screenshot that makes it quite clear that what they're doing is making it actually easy to use an encrypted filesystem from a desktop GUI. The instructions you post don't integrate into the desktop, nor are they by any means easy, sorry.

Re:I think my information is safe enough without i

[amliebsch]

I heard a fascinating report on NPR this morning about how even though so many options for email and file encryption are coming available, very few people actually use them. Even the big privacy advocates who encourage people to use encryption, it turns out, don't use encryption very much. I think a large part of it is because people don't actually think their data is worth encrypting. The other part of it is that the infrastructure is not ubiquotous enough or simple enough to make it worthwhile for everyday use.

In any case, the story is definitely worth a listen.