Ubuntu 9.10 Home Encryption Performance

It seems quite good to me.

holy crud, being able to encrypt your /home ... what will the ubuntoids claim they have revolutionized next? *scoff*

OK, this is hardly new to Linux but it *IS* new to have it working properly in Ubuntu. Considering the popularity of Ubuntu I guess this really is news.

I would never encrypt my entire /home directory. Encryption comes down to a simple choice: If something bad happens, do you prefer to loose access to your data or do you prefer other people gaining access? For most of my /home I prefer the latter. I do encrypt several separate parts of my filesystem selectively but not my entire /home.

And I go the other way: I would prefer to encrypt separate users' home directories with separate keys. It's possible, I've seen it done, it can be tuned to work very well in a shared/corporate environment, but alas...

gus, it's my home directory not the /home partition that is encrypted, sorry I made it appear otherwise.

never mind, I can't delete this so pretend nothing is here.

The missing piece in articles about encryption is what about the bigger picture? We hear all these horror stories about 'contractors' losing laptops that have the personal data of every human on the globe in them, and dangit they should have been using encryption. Actually they should have been using brains. But I digress.

There are all kinds of holes where our files leak out, like email attachments, USB sticks, and fileservers. What about backups, what's the best way to manage those? What if the user has a weak password, which is the norm? What if someone gets access to your machine while it is on? Encrypting files is easy, it's the larger strategy that doesn't seem to get addressed. Hmm, now that could be an article...

In my test Debian Lenny install, I went for fully encrypted LVM. Once I get sufficiently motivated to move my files off the Ubuntu laptop (which needs a CMOS battery and could use a new hard drive ... or which needs to be replaced entirely ...) I'll start a longer Debian Lenny test.

My laptop, the whole thing is encrypted sans 100 meg for /boot. The portable hard drive that I carry with it, 10 gig in FAT32 unencrypted, 240 gig ext3 encrypted. Desktop, thats a tricky one, ~200 gig encrypted that has to be manually mounted or a lot of things wont work, their configs and data are symlinked into the encrypted partition.

p.s. the encrypted laptop, that was done via an installer option.