Hard Drive Encyption

BiomedOtaku@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 38 points –

Anybody know a guide or reading material on learning how to encrypt hard drives ?

39

Depends on what sort of underlying file system you want to use on the drive. For Linux filesystems (ext4, btrfs, zfs etc), here's a good start: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt

For NTFS, BitLocker is already baked in to Windows.

I won't really trust Bitlocker coming from Microsoft.

What do you have against NSA_KEY I swear it's not a backdoor!

I've nothing against NSA_KEY nor Bitlocker, but anything in context with GAFAM I take it with grain of salt.

You have nothing about backdoors being built into the OS? Really?

What are you talking about? Ofcourse everyone should worry about backdoors and other vulnerabilities. But I'm sceptical if bitlocker is the right solution.

On a serious note I use a lot of tools to circumvent those vulnerabilities.

Bitlocker is only redumentary included in the cheaper Windows "Home" versions
only the "Pro" version actually includes proper Bitlocker tools which is frankly a pretty stupid move

Probably not what you're looking for but Linux Mint has the option to encrypt your drive when you first install it. It's as easy as clicking "yes" and setting a password.

Last I checked, Mint only allows you to encrypt your home partition. I know that Fedora supports full disk encryption via a toggle at installation.

Mint only allows you to encrypt your home partition.

Lol WTF? Cryptsetup has been a thing for what? Twenty years?

encrypting /home is good if you have multiple users also eCryptfs is also thing for several years just like LUKS/dm-crypt

/home encryption can be useful, but the fact that the installer does not offer FDE is laughable.

Also don't use ecryptfs, it sucks.

yeah, i love mint but have felt like its installer is severley lacking for a long time when it come to maore advance d stuff liek FDE, BTRFS, alternate bootloaders like suystemd-boot etc

Also don’t use ecryptfs, it sucks.

no clue there. i use luks on feodora and seem liek it works pretyy good.

no clue there. i use luks on feodora and seem liek it works pretyy good.

Luks is fantastic. Ecryptfs not so much.

Perhaps you had another partition with an operating system on the same disk, which prevented full disk encryption? If installing on an empty disk, most distros offer full disk encryption by default.

That definitely wasnt the case when I was last installing Mint, as I don't dual boot and always select the option to overrite the entire disk during installation. The way I remember it, it says "[checkbox] Encrypt your home partition" with no other options. Not sure if there is an equivalent to Fedora's settings or an advanced mode (like blivet-gui) to setup full disk encryption manually.

when you choose the partitions you want, there is a little checkbox asking you if you want to encrypt your hard drive

i think endeavour lets yuo do FDE from the gui installer also but yeah fedora is fucking great

Holy shit, what kind of pirated material are you hiding? :P

encrypting the drive mainly prevent an eventual thief from getting access to your files, including personal documents and web cookies, since system passwords does absolutely nothing against someone with access to your hard drive, and that includes paswords you may have writtend on a file that you later deleted, where as if you encrypted your drive, there is nothing you have to worry about but to buy another computer if it is stolen

totally valid points, i'm just betting deadbeat eventual thief hasn't got the smart on how to bypass windows passwords. It's a gamble, but i'm willing to look into encryption based just off of that.

Could be a hard drive of normal pirated movies and going across the border. But encrypting it would be dumb anyway.

Also, it's just a normal security measure. If pirating is illegal in your country it will always be better to encrypt the incriminating material in case of a search warrant.

You also need to make sure you don't have a key disclosure law. Otherwise you need plausible deniability.

Who knows their reasons? I was just being silly hehe

Is travelling to another country with pirated movies an issue?

How do they know it's pirated? If I rip my own DVD/blu-ray, put it in folders, and download subtitles. How does that look different from a completed torrent?

Remember that you have essentially no rights at borders. They don't have to prove their suspicions. You have to prove innocence.

I mean you're right, what I am saying is how does a digital copy of a film draw suspicion? Unless they find the actual torrent files, they have no grounds to even claim you're doing something. I do not know of any countries outside of North Korea where content cannot be carried around digitally.

I feel like if they singled you out to dredge your computer/hard drive that you have on you at the border. Then use that search to claim you were transporting pirated content, they likely had you in their sights before hand. The chain of events of finding say a digital movie, and them accusing you of piracy (without torrent files, just the existence of a movie/show digitally) just does not logically compute to me. Id be suspicious they were attempting to target me prior, and that was all they could find "to get something"

Yeah, no idea. I've never even thought about it because no one cares about all that in India (at least usually).