It's available now from my git repo, and on CPAN

As always, "patches welcome".

First off, you're going to want to have your livecd handy, because it's likely something won't quite be right the first time around. Also, you'll want to make sure your kernel is built with support for initramfs. This requires the BLK_DEV_INITRD configure option, named "Initial RAM filesystem and RAM disk (initramfs/initrd) support" in the "General setup" menu. You'll then need to specify the location of a source file for the initramfs.

Probably the easiest thing to do is to grab my current initramfs package and tweak it to suit your needs. You'll at the least need to change some paths in the config.txt and init files. But, it should serve as a good starting point. When you're done, put the path to the config.txt file in the "Initramfs source file(s)" (CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE) setting in the kernel.

Now, rebuild and reinstall your kernel, reboot, and pray.

I hope this will help people improve their laptop's security. Feel free to post any questions you have in the comments. Good luck!

The partitioning scheme I'm currently using is like this:

/dev/sda1 - /boot (ext2)
/dev/sda2 - LUKS encrypted lvm2 physical volume

The /boot partition is created like any normal ext2 partition.

The sda2 partition is created like so:

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda2

This usually is sufficient to provide decent encryption, but it is worth checking the documentation for cryptsetup to look for further options -- in particular, the option to use a keyfile.

Once we formatted this partition, we'll need to open it, so that we can then add our lvm pv to it:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 sda2_crypt

We'll now have a new device available as /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt. This can be treated just like any other block device -- we could just format it as a regular ext3 partition, but then we can't really ever resize it. So, we're going to make a LVM2 partition:

pvcreate /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt

Now, we create a volume group. I choose 'Exherbo' as the name, but you can really just use whatever (often people just use 'vg').

vgcreate Exherbo /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt

Now, we just need to make our partitions:

lvcreate -L 1G -n swap Exherbo
lvcreate -n root Exherbo
vgscan
vgchange -a y

This creates a 1G swap partition, and uses the rest of the space for our root (/) partition. Again, see the documentation for lvm2 for more options.

Finally, we need to format those partitions:

mkswap /dev/mapper/Exherbo-swap
mke2fs -T ext3 /dev/mapper/Exherbo-root

Next time, I'll go over how to boot this system.

The basic kernel configuration that I mentioned a long time ago still holds. Basically, you need to have the following options built into your kernel: CONFIG_DM_CRYPT, CONFIG_CRYPTO_CBC, CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA256, and CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES. Most of those will be turned on when you enable:

Device Drivers ->
  Multiple devices driver support (RAID and LVM) ->
    Device mapper support ->
      Crypt target support

However, the SHA256 support will not be. It can be found at:

Cryptographic API ->
  SHA224 and SHA256 digest algorithm

On the note of kernel configuation: for this process, you will need to do a fair amount of work from within another linux environment (most likely a LiveCD). For Gentoo, the most recent CD image I've found that has all the necessary configuration is the 2006.1 version... As I recall, some of the intermediate minimal CDs, at least, didn't possess cryptsetup at all. And the most recent weekly build I tried, while it did have lvm and cryptsetup installed, didn't have CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA256 either built in, or as a module.

Probably the best bet is an Ubuntu 8.10 Alternative CD. You'll have to either boot in recovery mode, or go through a bit of the installation procedure, as it doesn't initially have cryptsetup available. But, once it's detected the CD and loaded the modules from it, you can just switch to another virtual console and do things from there.

Next time, I'll outline creating the disk partitions.

About five months ago, I wrote about how to convert an existing Linux install from using regular partitioning to encrypted volumes (in particular, an encrypted /home with an unencrypted /). That sort of setup is relatively simple, once you have all the partitioning done. There is no need for any special early userland stuff (an initramfs image). However, that approach only provides a relatively minimal level of security for your data -- someone could still root your system.

For those who are a little more paranoid (especially in light of some recent news), the next level of security for your data is to encrypt everything except your /boot partition.

Going to this level, you're going to be repartitioning pretty much your entire hard disk, so you might be best off just backing up everything (you should do this in any case), and reinstalling your system.

Some recent Linux installers make this sort of setup relatively pain-free. For example, Ubuntu 8.04's Alternative install disk gives the option of setting up an encrypted LVM volume to install the system on during its guided partitioning wizard. This is a rather easy way have your laptop's data securely encrypted quickly. However, with this setup, I wasn't able to get suspend-to-disk support to function properly (though I'm sure it could be done with a little extra effort, I don't know if most Ubuntu users would be willing to do so).

However, this guide is focused on the crowd of people who use distros that do not make this easy. For myself, I'm installing Exherbo during this guide, but the instructions should be almost exactly the same for Gentoo, or most any other distro.

Partitioning Overview

For this first step, you will need to create two standard disk partitions. The first should be only 32M or so in size -- this will be our /boot partition, and should probably be ext2. The second will be the rest of the space you wish to devote to this Linux install (in my case, 10G).

The final layout of everything is going to be like this:

/dev/hda1 - /boot
/dev/hda2 - dm-crypt encrypted volume, containing one lvm2
  physical volume

/dev/mapper/hda2_crypt - what we get when we run cryptsetup luksOpen
  on hda2, contains one lvm physical volume, containing the volume
  group "vg"

/dev/mapper/vg-swap - our swap partition
/dev/mapper/vg-root - our root partition

With this layout, all our data that can be encrypted / lvm-ized is. And we only need to enter our disk decryption key once to get to all of it.

Next Time...

In my next few posts, I'll go into more details about how to set this partition scheme up, how to configure your kernel, and how to create the necessary initramfs image to boot from an encrypted / partition.

Similarly, while I'd say I'm pretty *NIX savvy, I'm not too familiar with some BSD-isms, particularly where they differ from Linux. Are there any good books out there to help with the transition from Linux to FreeBSD? (No, I'm not abandoning Linux... it's just that my current employer used FreeBSD for many things.)

Any suggestions?