Loop-aes

From BNL Physics Computing

Michael Creutz sends:

I set up loop-aes on my personal laptop to give me an encrypted partition for private stuff. The documentation is a bit confusing, but it actually is quite easy to set up: 

apt-get install loop-aes-modules-2.6-486
put "loop" in /etc/modules
reboot
losetup -e AES128 /dev/loop0 /dev/hdax
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0
make a directory to mount it on: I use /private
in /etc/fstab add something like
 "/dev/hdax /private ext3 defaults,user,loop=/dev/loop0,encryption=AES128,noauto 0 0"

There are some notes on setting up fsck'ing in 

/usr/share/doc/loop-aes-utils/README

The password needs to be >=20 characters, but spaces are allowed.

Once installed it is trivial to use, just enter "mount /private" and enter your password. Later either umount it or turn the computer off to hide things again. Not that I care about BNL stuff, but now I am much more relaxed about keeping things like tax records on the laptop.

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