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Encrypt whole system?

My laptop isn’t under my supervision most of the time. And I’d hate it if someone were to steal my SSD, or whole laptop even, when I’m not around. Is there a way to encrypt everything, but still keep the device in sleep, and unclock it without much delay. It’s a very slow laptop. So decryption on login isn’t viable, takes too long. While booting up also takes forever, so it needs to be in a “safe” state when simply logged out. Maybe a way that’s decrypt-on-demand?

I’m on Arch with KDE.

thepiguy ,

Maybe systemd-homed is the solution you are looking for. The arch wiki has a page for it. And this can be better for your use case because only your home folder needs decryption and not the whole drive.

There is this to keep in mind since you are using KDE, but can be easily fixed: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-homed#Home_direc…

bruhbeans ,

How old are we talking? If the CPU is >10 years old and/or some kind of ARM, it may not have hardware encryption acceleration, which means it’ll happen in software. I did that once, it was horrible. lscpu |grep -i aes should probably tell you what you need to know.

bloodfart ,

That’s a hard thing to do for a bunch of reasons. There’s someone else who went into em so I’m not gonna do that.

Unless something’s seriously wrong, it would probably be better to just make your laptop boot faster.

So, what’s your laptop, what kind of disk does it have and how long does it take to boot/login?

sudo ,

The standard route is to decrypt on boot. It happens after GRUB but before your display manager starts. IDK if there even is a setup that has you “decrypt on login”. Thats sounds like your display manager (sddm for KDE) is decrypting system which is not possible IMO.

Unless your laptop somehow has multiple drives you’ll want to use the “LVM on LUKS” configuration. 1 small partition for /boot. The rest gets LUKS encrypted, and an LVM group is put on the LUKS container. Or you could replace LVM with btrfs.

This will require wiping your system and reinstalling so you have some reading to do.

The arch-install script in the live iso has options for full disk encryption.

If you suspend to RAM your system will stay unencrypted, because your ram is not encrypted. if you suspend to disk (aka hibernate) your system will be encrypted. You go through the boot loader when waking from hibernation but it just drops you off where you left off.

You need a swapfile for hibernation so make sure its inside the LUKS container.

BaalInvoker ,

Encrypting and decrypting are complex operations that requires a lot from the hardware. The resources needed to encrypt and decrypt is proportionally correlated with the amount of files you’re encrypting and decrypting.

That said, there are some alternatives

  1. Encrypt the whole filesystem
  2. Encrypt only your home folder
  3. Encrypt only the files you wanna

There is an app, Vaults, that allows you to create vaults to easily encrypt and decrypt folders. Take a look on this app

frightful_hobgoblin ,

theintercept.com/…/encrypting-laptop-like-mean/

that_leaflet , (edited )
@that_leaflet@lemmy.world avatar

With an encrypted disk, you only need to enter the encryption password when you shutdown or restart. Suspending and sleep lock screen don’t need your encryption password.

remram ,
@remram@lemmy.ml avatar

Suspending to disk usually requires a password on resume.

that_leaflet ,
@that_leaflet@lemmy.world avatar

That’s true for hibernation, but not suspending. Hibernation stores everything in RAM onto the disk then shuts off the PC; to resume the system, you need to unlock the disk to access that data. Suspending doesn’t turn off the computer, it keeps the CPU and RAM active.

On my Fedora system, I can hit the suspend button and get back into the OS without needing to type my encryption password, only my user password.

remram ,
@remram@lemmy.ml avatar

Ok so what do you call “sleep”? You’ve now listed suspending, sleeping, and hibernating as 3 different things.

that_leaflet ,
@that_leaflet@lemmy.world avatar

I can sleep “sleep”. All system components are still powered on at this stage, so it uses the most power. But at the same time it’s the quickest to get back into your system. All that’s really happening with sleep is that the screen turns off.

Then you have suspend. Laptops often first go to sleep but then suspend after a long period of inactivity to save battery.

Then you have hibernation. I don’t think this is used that often nowadays.

remram ,
@remram@lemmy.ml avatar

I have never met anyone refer to “screen off” as “sleep”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_mode

The terms everybody else are using are: “sleep” = “suspend to RAM” = “S3” and “hibernation” = “suspend to disk”.

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