Re: 2.6 cryptoloop questions

[Boyd Waters <bwaters+moz@nrao.edu>]

mike@flyn.org wrote:

> 1.  What is the deal with adding arguments to losetup so that the program will 
> support calling external hashing programs (Ben Slusky's work I think)?  I have 
> been hashing passwords with openssl, a pipe and losetup's -p 0 option for quite 
> some time.  Why is the additional code needed?  Am I missing something here?

I think it is so you can specify options to the mount(8) program in 
/etc/fstab; this might give people the option of a rather powerful 
system setup with management from only one file (/etc/fstab) -- you can 
imagine not having to use a crypto-swap wrapper script, for example.


> 2.  Is it safe to use the 2.6 code to encrypt a swap partition (or safe to
> start testing this since this is all experimental code)?

I certainly think so.

> 3.  Mount needs to support variable key sizes.  I have seen a little discussion  
> about this but I fear much of it went on using other mailing lists.  Losetup 
> supports variable key sizes so mount should somehow.  Granted, losetup is not 
> usually suid root, but the code addition to mount is minimal and mount is 
> essentially broken without it.  Comments?

Loop-AES patches to losetup certainly support this, so it must be useful 
to people. Investigate at loop-aes.sourceforge.net

Thanks for your comments!

-- boyd


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