Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:46:38 +0100 (CET) From: Christian Baer <christian.baer@informatik.uni-dortmund.de> To: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Subject: A few things about GELI Message-ID: <drlccu$1uv6$2@nermal.rz1.convenimus.net>
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Good afternoon[1], fellow readers! :-)
Because I wanted something new to play with and because I found the idea
of encrypting swap and temp space, I decided to give GELI a try. The
idea of using crypto(9) seems good too, because that way hardware
support is added at no extra cost - I know, that was part of the reason,
why GELI was written. :-)
Note:
This thread is not really related to the one I started on the security
mailing-list. Because of the existing crypto-hardware GELI won that
race described there. This here is more of personal interest.
The question is more of an academic nature, but interesting just the
same: Can it be said that GELI is more secure (by design) than GBDE or
vice versa? The differences are not only of cosmetic nature or in the
user interface, but there is a real difference within the concept. Can
one of these approaches be called more secure than the other[2]?
Are there any plans to add additional ciphers like Twofish or Serpant to
GELI?
What does this "sector-to-sector encryption" mean and how is it
different from GBDE's approach?
Are there plans for a geli(4) manpage inspired by gbde(4) manpage? It
just shows the non-expert wonderfully, how it works and how safe it is
(in numbers).
Now for some *real* questions... :-)
GBDE wants to be attached to a partition like adxs1d. The examples in
the handbook however suggest that GELI should be attached to the
hardware-device adx and not to a partition. Why is this so? I am
guessing that GELI would be just as happy to be attached to ad1s1d as to
ad1 (wouldn't this be mandatory if there were more than one partition on
the drive?), but does this have any (dis-) advantages?
If I were to use encrypted swap space I couldn't use the fstab for these
anymore. Should I do this with a start-up script and if so, where should
I put it? 'Where' as in 'where should it be in the boot-order?'
Basicly the same thing goes for temp-space. When should it be mounted.
And more importantly, if I use a new key every time, wouldn't I need a
newfs during every boot - before I mount /tmp?
Regards
Chris
[1] Depending on your time zone of course. :-)
[2] I don't see either of them being cracked any time soon and if either
were attacked it would probably be easier to brute force the
passphrase than to attack the architecture itself.
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