conceal home folder completely - is ecryptfs the right choice?

Question

On my Debian-Testing-System, I want to completely conceal the home folders. That means, I not only want the data to be encrypted, but I also want to preclude determining any (or most) information from the encrypted data.

For instance, also file names should be encrypted. But not being an expert for data protection, maybe also other file/folder attributes need to be encrypted to grant privacy.

I considered ecryptfs to achieve this (Package ecryptfs-utils)

However, is this the right choice for my needs?

I also would appreciate links to step-by-step instructions on the implementation of encrypted home-folders in Debian very much!

[edit] I do a fresh install, therefore it's not necessary to migrate a previously unencrypted home folder.

Answer 1

Ecryptfs stores each encrypted file in one file (the lower file, in ecryptfs terminology). The directory structure of the lower files mirrors that of the payload files, although the file names are encrypted. The metadata (modification times, in particular) of the lower files also reveals that of the payload files. The size of the lower file is slightly larger than the size of the payload (with a fixed overhead for Ecryptfs's metadata)¹.

If you're storing your own work, where the attacker would already know roughly what kinds of data you have (“I already know this is a source code tree, and I know these are spreadsheets, what I want to know is !”), none of that is a problem. But if you're storing directory trees that may be identified by their layout (directory structure, approximate sizes, dates), then Ecryptfs is not the right tool for you.

Use encryption at the block device level. Linux provides this with dm-crypt. You can encrypt either the whole disk (except for a small area for the bootloader), or encrypt /home or some other partition. If you don't encrypt the whole disk, keep in mind that confidential information might end up in other places, especially the swap space (if you have any encrypted data anywhere, you should encrypt your swap). Note that if you go for whole-disk encryption, your computer will not be able to boot unattended, you will have to type your passphrase at the keyboard.

Since the whole block device is encrypted, the location of file content and metadata cannot be detected by an attacker who steals the disk. Apart from a header at the beginning of the encrypted area, the content is indistinguishable from random noise. An attacker could derive some information from seeing multiple snapshots of the encrypted data and studying how various sectors evolve over time, but even with this it would be hard to find out anything interesting, and this doesn't apply if you stop modifying the data after the attacker has seen the ciphertext (as in the case of a disk theft).

Many distributions offer the possibility to create a dmcrypt volume or encrypt the whole disk at install time. You may have to select the “advanced” or “server” installation image as opposed to the “desktop” or “basic” image.

The tool to manipulate dm-crypt volumes is cryptsetup. To create a dmcrypt volume, create a partition /dev/sdz9, say, then run cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdz9. You'll need to add the volume to /etc/crypttab; use cryptsetup luksOpen to activate the volume on the spot, or cryptmount -a after you've set up /etc/crypttab. Dm-crypt is only a cipher layer, so you'll need to make a filesystem on the encrypted volume.

Install Backtrack 5 r2 into running LUKS setup installed with ubuntu has a tutorial on setting up dm-crypt entirely manually.

¹ _{Experimentally, with default settings, the lower file size is the payload file size, rounded up to a multiple of 4kB, plus an 8kB overhead.}

Answer 2

As for the tutorial, search engines seem to work, e.g. this one on howtoforge.com seems to give reasonable hints.

Generally you might want to reconsider what exactly you are trying to achieve in the end. While eCryptfs will (to some degree) guarantee confidentiality you should be aware of several things:

• to hide the contents of home directory from other users, mere chmod go=- $HOME should suffice. If really necessary, you can use just chmod go-rw $HOME to allow them to enter the directory. AFAIU eCryptfs doesn't do much in this regard, since it relies on the underlying filesystem when it comes to access control.

• root (and not necessarily just root) can usually do pretty much everything on most systems, so no encryption will protect the users from a malicious administrator or even a successful attacker.

If what you are trying to achieve is for theft protection, regular filesystem on encrypted partition/drive is probably a better solution - it's easier to set up, there's just one password for the whole filesystem and it's entirely transparent. In any case, you should encrypt your swap (since that is where your cleartext passwords/certificates might end up). You should also encrypt hibernation data (if you are using suspend to disk), as that's another plase where sensitive data will appear. However this might be a bit trickier.