Interesting Idea but to hard to practice

Story: LXer Feature: Browser security: why an insecure browse-only account doesn't workTotal Replies: 1
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peragrin

Oct 19, 2005
7:42 AM EDT
My current solution to this problem.

An encrypted disc image to store my important no one else should read these files. When I need to view those files I simply mount the image, edit, as I need to and then unmount the image. Back up is simple as I can back up on 50 meg file which stores all my documents. Of course to make life confusing for others I don't actually have 50 megs worth of files in that image.

Under Linux I know it's possible. I use OS X for my daily machine at the moment. Here it is really simple as one can create either a user with an encrypted home folder or an encrypted disk image. The entire home folder is a bit much. Since it also's encyrpt your music, videos, pictures, everything.

hkwint

Oct 19, 2005
12:42 PM EDT
Thanks for the solution.

Though I use harddisk-encryption for my /home partition (which indeed doesn't contain music and video), I haven't thought of this yet.

I am thinking about it now: it should be possible to make an encrypted file, owned and only readable/writable by root, and then give the non-root user the permission to mount it (using losetup). When it's mounted, the actual files on it are owned by the normal non-root user. In this way, when it's not mounted, the non-rootuser, and programs running under the non-rootaccount, can't destroy it. What I also like about this solution, is the ability to create encrypted backups without much effort.

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