I recently switched to Linux (Zorin OS) and I selected “use ZFS and encrypt” during installation. Now before I can log in it asks me “please unlock disk keystore-rpool” and I have to type in the encryption password it before I’m able to get to the login screen.
Is there a way to do this automatically like with Windows or MacOS? Zorin has biometric login which is nice but this defeats the purpose especially because the encryption password is long and tedious to type in.
Also might TPM have anything to do with this?
EDIT: Based on the responses I have to assume some of you guys live in windowless underground bunkers sealed off with concrete because door locks “aren’t secure against battering rams”. Normal people don’t need perfect encryption they just want to add an extra hurdle or two for the crackhead who steals the PC. I assumed Linux had a system similar to what Windows or MacOS has been doing for a decade but I am apparently wrong.
I use partial disk encryption myself using luksCrypt but without the auto unlock, your comment on the crackhead stealing it doesn’t help you in that scenario, you 1000% can tie a partition encryption or home directory encryption and have it automatically decrypt using either a USB drive or TPM but, as is with Windows and MacOS if your PC gets stolen, the drive will be unlocked automatically regardless if it is you, it’s only if the drive gets stolen on it’s own that an auto unlock drive would help you, but it’s not likely that only that will happen. At that point it might not be worth encrypting as a whole if that was your main concern.
My previous laptop got struck by lightning last month. Because I had a passphrase & not TPM for unlocking, I stripped the NVMe from the board, put it in an enclosure, entered the passphrase, & now I can access all my data for recovering from that situation. Had I tied it to TPM, I wouldn’t be able to recover my data (ZFS & Bcachefs only have one ‘slot’ for passphrases so no secondary, backup key)—while, as you pointed out, a thief can just boot the laptop they stole to get the data. Point being: passphrases offer advantages while being dead simple.
shame it got struck by lightning, in another world you would’ve won the lottery with those chances
Kinda curious as to the point of drive encryption if you just want it to automatically unlock on boot.
Encryption makes it more difficult to copy data from the drive. Windows and MacOS can manage to encrypt drives without requiring two different passwords, I mistakenly assumed Linux could too.
How… How would they get the drive? Would n that need access to your computer? I imagine at that point they could turn it on first and copy your data that way, no?
Disk encryptions entire point is securing against physical access
No. With FDE, an adversary can’t just trun it on and copy data unless there are some 0day on the login that allows exectuing arbitrary codes.
Or you use TPM, which you can get the key out of
But if you have it set to unlock automatically…? It’s not like the drive is going to know it’s you booting it vs someone else if you’re not having to enter the password.
Windows and Mac can indeed encrypt drives without two passwords - as long as you don’t set a drive encryption password to be entered at BIOS load before the OS loads, which is what you’ve done.
as long as you don’t set a drive encryption password to be entered at BIOS load before the OS loads, which is what you’ve done.
MacOS does ask for a different password during setup, which you never have to use again unless you want to access the drive on a different PC.
The idea is to use TPM to store the keys - if you boot into a modified OS, TPM won’t give you the same key so automatic unlock will fail. And protection against somebody just booting the original system and copying data off it is provided by the system login screen.
Voilà, automatic drive decryption with fingerprint unlock to log into the OS. That’s what Windows does anyway.
I don’t suppose you know of a tutorial to get this set up? Google turned up nothing.
Might be pretty complicated. https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/dimtjv// Your best bet is probably to enable autologin and use the same password for the encryption
I see. I don’t know that the usual drive encryption you set up during Linux install works with that, but there are BitLocker-like programs for Linux that might.
Although OPs scenario is if someone steals the tower, in which case it’s not a different TPM. Would only help if the drives were yanked, which honestly I’d probably do rather than try to take the whole tower.
If you boot the computer into the currently installed OS, you will be presented with a login screen and will have to enter the correct password to log in (kernel parameters are part of the checksums, so booting into single-user mode won’t help you, that counts as a modified OS). If you boot a different OS, you won’t get the key off the TPM.
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Yes, but they are asking how to set up FDE in the same way it works on Windows, where automatic unlocking works using TPM. They just don’t know the technical details.
If you’re having it automatically unlock the drive at boot, it kind of defeats the purpose. If someone steals your tower, they can boot it and copy the unencrypted contents since it automatically unlocks.
I dont think you can. Can you read SSD storage while that is running? The drive needs to be decrypted using the TPM, and that should only work when its plugged in.
It depends on where the encryption data is stored. If the bootloader and bios/efi are locked down and the data to unlock is stored in an encrypted enclave or one is using a TPM (and not an external chip one that can be sniffed with a pi), that’s a reasonable protection for the OS even if somebody gains physical access.
You could also store the password in the EFI, or on a USB stick etc. It doesn’t help you much against longer-term physical access but it can help if somebody just grabs the drive. It’s also useful to protect the drive if it’s being disposed of as the crypto is tied to other hardware.
Even just encrypting the main OS with the keys in the boot/initrd has benefit, as ensuring that part is well-wiped makes asset disposal safe®. Some motherboards have an on-board SDCard or USB slot which your can use for the boot partition. It means I don’t have to take a drill to my drives before I dispose of them
OP isn’t asking for it to decrypt automatically. OP is asking for the entering the decryption password to also log you in. That way you only have to type the password once, instead of twice.
GDM has an autologin feature, OP should use it.
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Bypassing login is not difficult on a lot of OS.
Yeah, but a lot of those things will trip the TPM module, so you will get a different decryption key if you for example try to use the
singlekernel parameter to boot into a root shell. And different decryption key means no access to the data.At least on Windows that requires booting the PC from some other media, and that wouldn’t work with the drive encrypted because you have no access to the files you need to modify.
Is it similar with Linux, or do you mean you can actually bypass login from the OS that’s already booted up??
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By intercepting the key on hardware level
Perfect security doesn’t exist. If they’ve got the engineering capital required to design and manufacture key retrieval hardware, you lost the moment they gained physical access to your equipment.
I agree. Physical access to the device and its often game over.
Sadly reading off the key is already trivial in some cases as showcased in this recent video by stacksmashing
Since the key has to be sent to the cpu in plain text it can easily be sniffed. If however the TPM is integrated in the cpu its not so easy, but then the os can be manipulated or hacked after boot with known exploits.
If you have a long and secure password for you encryption the absolute only way in is to brute force the key which is significantly harder if not impossible regardless of capital
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Most brute-force attacks can be hardened against. Again there’s no perfect security, just better security.
If he uses TPM. I’m not aginst OP using it but he needs to understand the drawbacks. At least I hope he will.
You ended up with full disk encryption. For most people, it’s the simple option, everything is encrypted. That means the OS can’t start without the key, because you’re the only holder of the key. It’s both dead simple, and pretty bulletproof since there’s no way to access the system without the password. But as you said, not everyone wants that.
What you’re asking for is an encrypted home directory. It’s not that Linux can’t do it, it’s just not what you got. Depending on the use case you can either use TPM to unlock the root partition to boot, or not encrypt the system itself. Then when you log in, it decrypts a separate partition (or use ZFS native encryption, or use fscrypt if your filesystem supports it, or use an overlay filesystem like go-cryptfs).
So it’s not that Linux doesn’t support your use case but rather your distro doesn’t offer it as an installation option. From there you either configure it yourself (ArchWiki is great regardless of distro), or seek out a distro that does.
Linux is not an operating system, it’s just the kernel. What makes it an OS is what distros build on top of it. Linux alone is not that useful, hence the basis of the GNU+Linux memes: it’s Linux, plus a lot of GNU tools to make it do useful things, plus a desktop environment and a whole bunch of other libraries and applications, plus the distro’s touch tying it all together in a mostly cohesive experience.
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Fprintd is the only biometrics I know and hardware support is very limited. There are no easily accessible usb fingerprint readers either, which would allow easy testing and recommending.
I think if we could reverse engineer some kensington / etc. fprint sensor that would be huge.
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But I’m confused, the decryption of the home directory needs the owners secret to be entered at some point? I don’t see how this solves Op’s problem (which I also don’t understand, you want encryption, you need to decrypt stuff at some point)
Yes, the question is when and how.
You can enter it in the bootloader as a prerequisite to boot anything. You can also enter it at the display manager / login screen, which is a little further down the boot process.
My desktop for example can boot up to the login screen and perform its NAS and routing duties all on its own. But my user and all of my user’s data is still locked at that point: the computer is usable by guests and everything but even if you manage to throw a root exploit at it, my data is completely safe. Only when I log in, either locally or remotely, my password will go through PAM which will run a script that uses my password to unlock my home directory and mount it as I’m logging in.
What changes is what is covered by the encryption, and when the key is required. My root is auto unlocked via TPM, my home is unlocked on demand as I log in to my user account.
OP’s problem is they have full disk encryption so they need the password to boot up Linux at all, but they also get a second password prompt to log in when it reaches the display manager, even if it’s the same password. The solution is either they configure it to auto login since you need a password for the whole OS anyway, or they automate the unlocking of the root partition and use their login password to further decrypt the home directory (or rely entirely on the system being secure that the user isn’t encrypted further and it’s just a password prompt, which is what I think Windows does).
I see, thanks for the explanation. After asking you I kept on reading the comments and understood how tpm helps with the auto decryption.
I still think full disk encryption with auto login is more than enough, at least that’s what I have, and as you can tell anyone can set that up easily.
OP, just change your encryption key to whatever you have your password as and set your login to auto login. This will give you the experience you desire as it’ll decrypt the disk with your password and log you in automatically once it’s decrypted, but if you lock the system (close the lid. Screen lock. Etc) you’ll still get a login screen as normal. (Just keep in mind they’re technically two separate passwords and will unfortunately need to be changed separately if you do change your password).
What I do for a little extra security is that my encryption password is just a longer variation of my normal password. So of I have an encrypted password sentence like “correct battery staple horse” my login password would just be “correct battery”. It’s a simple way to add a little extra and a good reminder everytime I turn on my computer that they are in fact two different passwords and protect me differently.
This is solid advice
I think people are misunderstanding the whole point of drive encryption. It’s so that if the drive is stolen or lost, you don’t have to worry about it as much. I personally don’t see any benefit in doing this if I have to enter a password every time I plug the damn thing in. If you’re concerned about somebody stealing your laptop or desktop, the disk-encryption should be the least of your worries.
To the OC; if you happen to use GNOME, then check out the settings in the DISKS app. It has auto-unlock options in the per-drive settings. I long ago configured it so my USB is auto-unlocked upon being plugged in. Though after several system resets and such whatever I did to do that seems to no longer be visible in the GUI, I know that’s how I set it up in the first place.
To the OC; if you happen to use GNOME, then check out the settings in the DISKS app. It has auto-unlock options in the per-drive settings.
Thanks so much!
EDIT: This didn’t work
Is the setting missing? Or is the setting just not working properly? My laptop has the option greyed out and stuck in the “enabled” setting. I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, but I can try?
They do understand the point. The problem is that if you use TPM to unlock on boot it is slightly self defeating. Now the attacker has access to your display manager or TTY. They can guess passwords, try to bypass the biometric checks, or find an exploit. But that does indicate a higher tech level that your average thief.
I appreciate the concern but odds are if someone is stealing my PC its not going to be a 1337 hax0r. I am not keeping government docs on here I just don’t want someone to be able to rip out the HDD and have easy access to everything.
Others have given you ways of doing this, with TPM or hacking away by using the same password and auto-login. Many have told you you shouldn’t, but I think no one explained why.
When the bootloader chooses the OS that OS might be on an encrypted or an unencrypted disk. If the OS is on an unencrypted disk it can be easily hacked and then all bets are off. So the only safe option is if the OS is on an encrypted disk, however to do that you need to decrypt the disk to access it. Now there are two options, either you need to provide a key for decryption (it does not need to be a password, it can be a thumb drive or fingerprint) or it happens automatically. If it happens automatically it’s the same as not having encryption.
Enter TPM, which is trying to safely automatically decrypt the disk by using hardware validation. However here’s the problem, the only reason you need disk encryption is to prevent against your hardware being stolen. If your hardware was stolen and you don’t have disk encryption people can simply read the data. If you have disk encryption they need to decrypt the disk first. However when you use TPM or anything similar the disk gets decrypted automatically, meaning that it’s almost the same as not having encryption at all.
If a hacker got a hold of your unencrypted disk they can open it on a second OS and extract the data. If they got a hold of a fully encrypted disk they are more or less screwed. But if your computer unencrypted the disk on boot all they have to do now is access the disk from your OS. There are several ways of bypassing a login, brute force it, or create new users. Not to mention possible security issues that might give the attacker access to your entire system, which is already unencrypted. Yes, having some form of encryption, even if it unencrypts automatically is better than no encryption at all, but not by much. I would argue that if you care about the data not being accessed you shouldn’t have it decrypt automatically, and if you don’t mind it decrypting automatically then encryption might be overkill for you.
My mom brings me and my anime mousepad with boobs waifu bagel bites, what does your mom even do? Also, you can do autologin, so you only enter a password once to decrypt on boot.
Good comment. Unfairly downvoted IMO
Instead of encrypting the entire drive, encrypt the home folder. That way it’s unlocked when you sign in.
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Yes there is TPM for full disk encryption.
https://gist.github.com/orhun/02102b3af3acfdaf9a5a2164bea7c3d6#using-tpm-20
Do I had problem making swap partition work. As lockdown mode is triggered.
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/kernel_lockdown.7.html
I current only encrypted home.
You dont want to do that.
What’s the point of encrypting something without a good passphrase? It defeats the whole purpose.
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It’s disappointing to see so many commentors arguing against you wanting to do this. Windows has it through bitlocker which is secured via the TPM as you know. Yes it can be bypassed, but it’s all about your threat level and effort into mitigating it.
I am currently using a TPM on my opensuse tumbleweed machine to auto unencrypt my drive during boot. What you want to do is possible, but not widely supported (yet). Unfortunately, the best I can do is point you to the section in the opensuse wiki that worked for me.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Encrypted_root_file_system
If you scroll down on that page you’ll see the section about TPM support. I don’t know how well it will play with your OS. As always, back up all your files before messing with hard drive encryption. Best of luck!
Windows is no baseline for security lol
Thanks, Zorin is based on Ubuntu so I have to assume it will be up to date with stuff like TPM which is 15 years old. The data on the page you linked is pretty advanced for me but I’ll give it a shot. Appreciate you addressing my question.
Ubuntu isn’t really on the cutting edge, so I’m not sure how well its going to work. Opensuse tumbleweed is running pretty much the latest everything, so its possible youll need to wait until the next Ubuntu lts
Sums up about every thread asking how to do something on Linux, 30 different responses on how the OP is wrong and shouldn’t do it that way.
To be fair there are probably many different ways to solve the problem. I’m somewhat experienced with Linux and I’ve attempted seeing up TPM LUKS decryption on boot. It’s certainly not easy or at least wasn’t when I tried. For non experienced people it’s easier to just enter the password at boot and enable auto login. Then you get the security, software, ethics, or licensing debates that accompany most Linux discussions.
I mean it’s somewhat of a meme. But XY-Problems are super common. I also sometimes learned something new and that my approach wasn’t the best and I’m kinda experienced with Linux. It’s usually more the annoying and stupid people who don’t want to explain what they’re trying to achieve even if asked and insist on going with the path they’ve chosen without listening to advice… On the other hand it’s a balance. There are also nerds without social skills who don’t explain things well. But in my experience it’s frequently XY-Problems and the people asking for advice not listening.
This is also what I would recommend and is most similar to the windows experience
Yeah, holy shit is this comment section toxic. Why are people downvoting for someone asking for help and not being a dick?
Is this whole community like this? Are the mods okay with this behavior?
This is done via storing the unlock key in USB drive and need the USB plugged to auto unlock, see if it helps.
as others have pointed out, you can use systemd-cryptenroll to add your tpm as a way to unlock the disk at boot, security of this should be fine if secureboot is enabled (for this to work it will need to be anyway) and a password is set for the uefi. See the archwiki entry for setup info (command is as simple as
systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=auto /dev/rootdrive, also the device needs to be encrypted with luks2, no idea if zorin uses that by default but you can convert luks1 to luks2 {backup ur headers first!})
