[ale] Encrypted Laptop Questions

[John Mills]

Jim -

Several good things to look into. For starters it looks as though 
TrueCrypt meets my criteria pretty well. The FAQ and notes cover most of 
my points, though I have a few questions. I'll look a bit further.

Other comments also welcomed.

  - Mills

On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, Jim Kinney wrote:

> Fun path!  Look at ditching the F11 (outdated!)  and jump to F13 and install
> using the drive encryption option. It will require a password to decrypt the
> LVM containing / and swap (and /home, /var, etc).

> TrueCrypt is a multi-platform partition/file/drive encryption tool that will
> allow a shared partition to be a data swap area between the F13 and the
> windows. It can (I'm 90% certain) also encrypt the windows partition as
> well.

> Doing the XP in a VM may be the easiest way to do all of this - F13 with
> full drive encryption and no access to the drive contents even if removed.

> The unlock keys can be handled with either a password prompt _or_ with an
> external device and password prompt. The LUKS (method used for drive
> encryption) supports multiple password slots (up to 10) so a multiuser
> laptop can have individual passwords plus a master key.

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:03 AM, John Mills <johnmills at speakeasy.net>wrote:

>> I would like to learn about encrypted Linux and dual-boot installations
>> and would appreciate pointers to HOW-TOs, guides, and other sources of
>> background.

>> OBJECTIVE: protect data on the disk from non-authorized users, even if the
>> disk is removed to another machine.

>> Specifically I have a laptop computer that currently dual-boots WinXP and
>> FC11. There is also a VFAT disk partition shared by both the OS. The WinXP
>> installation has separate NTFS partitions for the OS files and user files,
>> but I assume that separation is not 100% clean due to applications that
>> may cache data in system directories or their installation directories.