Into.the.Void.

While Googling the net I bumped into this hilarious, frustrating, “insert your own word here” company that sells PCs with “extra security”. It installs linux with some encryption options and asks very large amounts of money for a few copy paste clicks.
Just check this from their site:

Installed Secure™

Level One: Default installation with firewall, encrypted swap, no insecure services such as sendmail. On Gentoo Linux we use Firehol the easy to read and verify iptables based firewall.

Level Two: Loop-AES encrypted partition backed GPG secured multi-key encryption in a subdirectory of the default user with the GPG keyring stored on a USB keychain drive.

Level Three: Entire /home partition is encrypted with a GPG secured multi-key encryption with GPG keyring and partition keys stored on USB keychain drive. You must log in as root at the command line before logging in to X windows.

Level Four: Encrypted root and /home partitions with GPG secured multi-key encryption. Laptop unusable without keychain (and trusted CDROM if so desired). It is impossible to modify or even ascertain what is on the computer.

How much does these cost ? Prepare yourselves…

Level1: 0$
Level2: 200$
Level1: 300$
Level1: 400$

How ridiculous can some people be ?
Level 2 is something like this previous post of mine. Let’s count the chars:
The characters of the commands needed are 470 (or 9 copy-paste lines as I have written them in my post). They are FULLY scriptable, ie a guy who knows a bit of bash can create a script to produce this kind of encrypted loopfiles with a single command in under 3 minutes. But let’s say they don’t copy paste the lines…but they write down every character every time…one by one. It still makes us 0.4255$ per character. THIS is called FRAUD! I am even typing more characters in this post than they are typing to get 200$.

It’s easy to spot which is this company…just google some terms…
If you find the site…check their other “offers” too…

Filed by kargig at 19:16 under General,Linux
No Comments | 2,568 views

It’s time for something more serious now, time to play with encrypted partitions and loop devices storing the keys on the usb key.

Following the excellent loop-AES.README I created an encrypted loop file that is encrypted with some random keys which are stored inside a file…and that file is encrypted with gpg and stored inside my usb stick. Confused ? Here it goes…

“Create 65 random encryption keys and encrypt those keys using gpg.”
# head -c 2925 /dev/urandom | uuencode -m - | head -n 66 | tail -n 65| gpg --symmetric -a >/mnt/usb-key/keyfile.gpg

Time for the loop file creation. An example of a 100Mb file follows:
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/my-encrypted-loop.aes bs=1k count=100000

Then encrypt the loop file using our previously generated keys. From losetup man page:

-K gpgkey
Password is piped to gpg so that gpg can decrypt file gpgkey which
contains the real keys that are used to encrypt loop device. If
decryption requires public/private keys and gpghome is not speci-
fied, all users use their own gpg public/private keys to decrypt
gpgkey. Decrypted gpgkey should contain 1 or 64 or 65 keys, each
key at least 20 characters and separated by newline. If decrypted
gpgkey contains 64 or 65 keys, then loop device is put to multi-key
mode. In multi-key mode first key is used for first sector, second
key for second sector, and so on. 65th key, if present, is used as
additional input to MD5 IV computation.

So…
# losetup -K /mnt/usb/keyfile.gpg -e AES256 /dev/loop3 /home/kargig/mytest
# losetup -d /dev/loop3


Now add this to /etc/fstab:
/my-encrypted-loop.aes /mnt/private ext3 defaults,noauto,user,loop=/dev/loop3,encryption=AES256,gpgkey=/mnt/usb-key/keyfile.gpg 0 0


now try this in order to check if the fstab entry is working and to format the loopfile:
# losetup -F /dev/loop3
# mke2fs -j /dev/loop3
# losetup -d /dev/loop3


If everything is fine…you can just try this:

mount /mnt/private

And you should be asked for your gpg passphrase 🙂 If you don’t have your usb key mounted, the loop file(or partition) won’t be mountable. BACKUP your keyfile.gpg!!!

What if you want to change your password ? Simply do this to decrypt the gpg file and re-encrypt it with a new password:
# gpg -d /mnt/usb-key/keyfile.gpg > /mnt/usb-key/clearkeys.txt
# cat /mnt/usb-key/clearkeys.txt | gpg --symmetric -a > /mnt/usb-key/newkeyfile.gpg
(now make sure the keyfile.gpg and newkeyfile.gpg differs, if yes it means that the gpg password was changed...move on)
# mv /mnt/usb-key/newkeyfile.gpg /mnt/usb-key/keyfile.gpg
# rm -f /mnt/usb-key/clearkeys.txt

(thanks to metown for pointing at some errors at the previous post)

What’s left to be done now is make it work like the pam_usb module, ie create a set of scripts(or programs?) so that when I want to mount the encrypted partition it will automatically check the usb key to find a private key to check it against the “partition’s public key” so there won’t be a need for typing a passphrase.

Filed by kargig at 02:31 under General,Linux
6 Comments | 4,016 views