Fellow selfhoster, do you encrypt your drives where you put data to avoid privacy problems in case of theft? If yes, how? How much does that impact performances? I selfhost (amongst other services) NextCloud where I keep my pictures, medical staff, …in short, private stuff and I know that it’s pretty difficult that a thief would steal my server, buuut, you never know! 🤷🏻♂️
This shouldn’t even be a question lol. Even if you aren’t worried about theft, encryption has a nice bonus: you don’t have to worry about secure erasing your drives when you want to get rid of them. I mean, sure it’s not that big of a deal to wipe a drive, but sometimes you’re unable to do so - for instance, the drive could fail and you may not be able to do the wipe. So you end up getting rid of the drive as-is, but an opportunist could get a hold of that drive and attempt to repair it and recover your data. Or maybe the drive fails, but it’s still under warranty and you want to RMA it - with encryption on, you don’t have to worry about some random accessing your data.
Always, if nothing else it makes “wiping” them securely easier.
Have you tried secure-erasing a disk?
Absolutely yes, I do enctypt my drives so I don’t have to ever do that again. This isn’t as critical for SSDs but it’s still a good idea. Even if you keep the key stored on the same system, securely deleting a tiny file is way easier than a whole disk.
Have you tried secure-erasing a disk?
Once /dev/urandom is enough. Who cares if a state actor could theoretically recover your media library in an expensive lab.
Even that takes a while.
And it has other benefits. For example a dying disk. You can just throw that out. I once tried to wipe such a disk and it’s a chore. It makes weird clicking noises and slows down to the point where it’d take years to overwrite it. Occasionally the SATA controller resets etc. And it won’t succeed at overwriting stuff. Sure I could go to the garage, get the power tools, put the hdd into a vise and delete everything with a combination of hammer and drill… But it’s much more convenient to have it encrypted and not care.
You take the disk out, drill once through it (use a metal bit).
Done.
Takes a couple minutes.
Sure. It’s just effort. I have to go fetch the power tools, fetch the drills, if I want to do it correctly also mount a vise or go fetch a piece of scrap wood and some clamps… After that clean up and remove the metal chips from my apartment…
At work I’d additionally need 3 training courses to be allowed to operate the drill press and visit the workshop. The whole process is going to take half a year. And it’ll still not be certified that the information is now gone.
In an enterprise setting, it’s probably a bit of a hassle with everything having to follow some kind of process…
Somehow they don’t trust the software developers with operating heavy machinery 😆
Anyways, I think we’re moving away from the topic… At work I didn’t encrypt harddisks anyways. They just put the servers into a special area in the datacenter that has a fence and a separate lock.
At home I just encrypt stuff so I don’t have to remember what I put where and handle things differently. Of course everything depends on the specific scenario and threat model. I have a bit of stuff archived on my server that isn’t around anymore, could be a copyright violation. I also have my complete life stored there, documents, finances, emails of a decade, pictures, backups for family members, passwords for emergency access to things. Admin stuff and logfiles that I’m required by law (GDPR…) not to share. I also used to travel a lot with my laptop in the backpack and that can get stolen. At some point a long time ago I decided to encrypt my harddisks and stop worrying. Since at least 10 years there isn’t any speed penalty anymore and it takes like 20 seconds to set it up on Linux…
But I can also see why not everyone wants to do it this way.
Yes.
I encrypt about everything. Laptop, server, backups, external hdds that are just for me. (Only thing I don’t encrypt is a VPS. It’s hosted on somebody else’s hardware and they’d be able to break the encryption anyways if they wanted.)
I just put LUKS on it before formatting a filesystem. For the OS I use the good old approach with LUKS and a LVM inside.
I mean if you don’t encrypt the backups, the encrytion of the system is kind of meaningless, isn’t it?
I have two WebDAV shares, one unencrypted and one encrypted. The unencrypted one is for things that need to be read by other services, like legally obtained movies and tv shows. The encrypted one is for porn, mostly (also stuff like tax documents, legal contracts, etc).
This is the server I use
https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
It’s really easy to set it up for encryption. Also, I wrote it. :)
Do you honestly encrypt your porn? Why? (Assuming it’s legal)
Good question. I don’t have a clue either. It doesn’t contain any personal information. (Unless it’s self-made.) Usually isn’t unique. And nobody cares as there’s an abundance of porn available everywhere on the internet.
