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Disk encryption best practices?
Hi there,
I'm about to encrypt my disk with loop-aes, and I'm wondering
whether this is a clever move:
1. The introduction (in German) at
http://wiki.chaostreff.ch/index.php/Festplattenverschl%C3%BCsselung
recommends not to use AES but to prefer Twofish.
In addition, GnuPG uses CAST5 as default for symmetric
encryption.
What is the state-of-the-art here?
2. The text at http://mareichelt.de/pub/texts.cryptoloop.php
warns against mainline cryptoloop:
"Both cryptoloop and dm-crypt in kernels prior to 2.6.10 are
vulnerable, and even recent dm-crypt still suffers from a weak
crypto implementation."
What is weak here?
3. The German Linux-Magazin 10/06 (http://www.linux-magazin.de)
features an article by Peter Gutmann and Christian Ney, where
they analyze different types of crypto filesystems. They
recommend Truecrypt, dm-crypt is second, and they essentially
warn against loop-aes:
They state that the code is complex and written in such a way
that it is difficult to judge whether it does what it is supposed
to do. In addition, return values are never checked (e.g., when
computing encryption keys), which might lead to a key consisting
of just zeros. However, the code is so sloppy that programs are
more likely to crash with null-pointer dereferences than to use
empty keys. Besides, they complain that by default passwords are
not salted and password hash iterations are not used.
The part about code quality sounds scary. Opinions?
Concerning salting and iterations, for my root partition, I just
have to uncomment to lines in build-initrd.sh, right?
Concerning Example 2 in the loop-aes README (partition backed
loop with gpg encrypted keys), I get salting and iterations with
the gpg patch provided with loop-aes, right?
I'm curious...
Jens
-
Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/