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I recently came across this November 2016 article.

I tried what they said and pressed the Enter button for 70 seconds and was able to get into some kind of black terminal screen. But I am so inexperienced that I don't know what it was exactly and I don't know if this is the vulnerability outlined in the article.

As the article suggested, I tried to add this command to the boot configuration, but it didn't work:

sed -i 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="panic=5 /' /etc/default/grub grub-install

I am using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with full disk encryption. I've looked around in this forum for a solution but didn't find anything specific to the apparently problem of accessing a LUKS encrypted partition.

Thanks for the help.

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  • By looking into article, patch needs to be enabled, not only grub. If you are not using LUKS, you shouldn't be afraid.
    – fugitive
    Feb 17, 2017 at 12:10
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    That article is scarmongering. The attacker gets access only to the unencrypted /boot partition, which does not contain any confidential information; they do not get access to the encrypted data. They can get access to that partition anyway by booting a live session from any bootable medium.
    – AlexP
    Feb 17, 2017 at 12:41

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As AlexP said, this article is B.S. There are a myriad of ways that you can get a root shell ( this one is a bug, but most are intentional ) but without the password you can not access the encrypted data. Given physical access to the machine there is nothing that can stop you from getting a root shell. That is the whole reason for using encryption.

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