Re: [arch-general] Encrypted ram disk?

Santhosh Joseph schrieb:

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Thomas Bächler wrote:

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Santhosh Joseph schrieb:

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For disk encryption, why not use truecrypt ? Why use truecrypt?

http://www.truecrypt.org/

You didn't answer my question. We discussed dm-crypt and you suggested to use truecrypt - without relating in any way to the problem being discussed or providing a solution that truecrypt may or may not have for it. Why is that? Can you even boot from a truecrypt-encrypted volume on Linux? If so, is that implemented on Arch Linux? How secure is truecrypt's key setup and how does it work? The only advantage of truecrypt against LUKS is the plausible denialbility feature that LUKS doesn't have, and the "hidden volumes", which IIRC only work with FAT32 file systems on truecrypt and are thus useless. Also, truecrypt has had serious security problems in the past, and instead of fixing them right away and informing the public, they just took the website down for several months until they released a new (on-disk incompatible) version (this is only as far as I remember it though, and I don't have a source for it, but it must have been 3 years ago or so). LUKS has a mathematically/cryptographically well-founded key setup procedure that makes brute force attacks against the passphrase infeasible in pratice and thus provides a very high level of security. It also allows to use any cipher and cipher operation mode available in the Linux kernel, which includes (but is not limited to) the ones provided by truecrypt.