2

I partitioned an HDD in to four, the biggest of them being the HOME directory. This drive was encrypted during xubuntu installation and worked perfectly fine. I then booted from another ubuntu live CD and checked this drive manually and found them to be encrypted as expected. But now that I have replaced xubuntu with ubuntu, with the same root password and name, the encrypted drive is visible again! Doesn't this imply that the encryption key is replaced (or diminished in value) by my mere 6-character password?

1 Answer 1

2

I might be resurrecting the dead, but I guess a late answer is better than no answer.

The way ecryptfs works is that the actual files are encrypted with a proper key, however this key is then stored encrypted by your user password in a file 'wrapped-passphrase' in the ~/.ecryptfs directory.

Although I'm no crypto expert, this does seem to suggest that your password is replaced by a mere 6 character password, so I would suggest to replace it with something strong.

While i'm not aware of the actual encryption scheme used in encryptfs, this doesn't have to mean that your 6-character key can actually be brute-forced. The key derivation method could be made prohibitively expensive as this only has to be done once for the correct password (by requiring thousands of decryption cycles for example), but doesn't impact the performance of the actual decryption of the files as this can be done with the longer secure key, once it is decrypted.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .