Hi! I want to try out fedora workstation in the near future (once 39 is out) and was wondering if systemd-homed is ready for everyday use yet.
I’m a bit paranoid and really need my private data encrypted. However, I don’t think that full disk encryption is practical for my daily use. Therefore I was really looking forward to the encryption possibilities of systemd-homed.
However, after reading up on it, I was a bit discouraged. AFAIK, there’s no option to setup systemd-homed at installation (of fedora). I was an Arch then Manjaro, then Endeavour user for years but don’t have the time/patience anymore to configure major parrts of my system anymore. Also, the documentation doesn’t seem too noob-friendly to me, which also plays into the time/patience argument.
Is it ready? Can anyone seriously recommend it for a lazy ex-Arch user who doesn’t want to break another linux installation?
Thank you in advance. :)
I second this.
Full disk encryption is entirely practical for everyday use. If you don’t already have a dedicated TPM, your motherboard/CPU may provide a software TPM (fTPM?). If so, you don’t even have to interact with the machine during boot. It’s just a bit slower to start up (by a few seconds), which really isn’t a big issue for your average user.
As others explained: If the FDE key is in RAM, I’m vulnerable. My thread model includes a stolen Laptop with the attackers able to freeze my RAM and reading out the keys.
Thank you for mentioning TPM though. Didn’t know of that before. :)
Pardon my ignorance here, but I don’t get it how is the whole thing still safe with unlocking from TPM instead of me providing the password at boot time?
Considering now anyone can just boot the machine into the installed system then bruteforce/exploit something to get login/get read permissions and make a plain copy of the data?
Where, without tpm, as long as I do not type in the encryption password myself I have a pretty high guarantee that the data is safe, especially when I am not at the (powered down) computer.
The idea behind it is that the files are stored encrypted at rest, which is really what you want, because once a system is booted, you have to play by the computer’s rules (respect file permissions, policies, etc.).
The TPM provides a secure mechanism to provide a decryption key to the computer during boot, eliminating the need for direct interaction.
Could it be compromised? Probably, but it would take considerably more effort than a man-in-the-middle on your keyboard via a logic analyzer.
This is a common misunderstanding insofar as how encryption works. You can’t flick a bit and TURN your storage unencrypted nor can you plausibly make your computer obey restrictions.
If your storage is encrypted it remains encrypted always including the file you have open right now. Your takes a plausibly length usable string and uses it to compute or retrieve the long binary number actually needed to decrypt your files. This number is stored in memory such that encrypted files can be decrypted when read into memory.
Once that key is loaded in memory anyone with 10 minutes and access to google could trivially unlock your computer in several different ways. It is virtually exactly like having no security whatsoever.
If you don’t actually enter a passphrase to unlock you have no meaningful security against anything but the most casual unmotivated snooping.
Your little sister might not be motivated enough to read your diary but the dipstick that stole your laptop will definitely be spending your money.
I highly doubt it.
If you have any tips for how I can personally bypass my computer’s encryption in 10 minutes without being able to login, I’d love to try my hand at it.
You aren’t actually asking to how to bypass encryption because the key is already in memory. You are asking about the much simpler task of compromising a computer with physical access to same. Depending on configuration this can be as ridiculous as killing the lockscreen process or as hard as physically opening the case chilling the contents of ram enough that data survives transfer to different physical hardware. See also the massive attack surface of the USB stack.
That doesn’t sound trivial at all.
On most systems you can press a hotkey in grub to edit the Linux command line that will be booted and in about 7 keystrokes gain access to any unlocked filesystem. Asking how you can break into a system you physically control is like asking how many ways you could break into a house supposing you had an hour alone with a crowbar the answers are legion. No machine in someone else’s hand which is unlocked can possibly be deemed secure.
Even dumber no installer will create such an insecure configuration because the people that design Linux installers are smarter than you.
Though after a point rubber hose cryptanalysis will become the more pragmatic option for an attacker.