Do you encrypt your data drives?
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.
If you're getting rid of a (rusty) drive and it leaves your hands with the cool magnets and shiny frisbees still inside, you're doing something wrong.
Dude just use a hammer
Yes of course, with dm-crypt (luks), very little as AES-NI is incredibly fast.
Do you insert the key/password manually every time (it's a server, so not so many times, but could happen) you boot the server?
https://www.cyberciti.biz/security/how-to-unlock-luks-using-dropbear-ssh-keys-remotely-in-linux/
As mentioned in another comment I haven’t quite gotten it working but it should be possible to do this via SSH
Nope. This isn't part of my threat model.
I don't have sensitive data and stealing a drive would be inconvenient for a thief.
You don't have sensitive data? Would you mind expanding on that a bit for me? Just curious how you like, live, and stuff.
Plex data, pi hole, and home assistant don't contain anything meaningful. No credentials are stored in a form that can be reused.
The most sensitive is immich, which I'm more concerned about backups than I am someone might steal my nudes. Their online anyway.
Email is hosted off-site and I still have physical files for a lot of my documents. If someone stole hdds out of my server, they'd get a lot of Linux isos, pictures of cars, porn, tons of versioned software and games installers, etc.
Maybe my definition of sensitive is different than yours though.
I keep my drives encrypted with a key currently hosted in my router hoping they wouldn’t steal that. I’m thinking of actually putting it to cloud so I can disable it remotely.
It was quite a ride to make everything work and I made a blog post explaining it so I remember what I did.
https://nowicki.io/self-hosting-lvm-raid1-with-key-over-ftp/
Interesting, thanks!
No,
There is all the backup of all my family pictures in the drives.
If something happens to me I want to make due that they will have access to it.
How do you even encrypt a server so that it doesn’t require human intervention every time it goes down/restarts?
Isn't that what a TPM could be used for?
i dunno is it? how to set that up?
I'm too lazy to look up the details. But you can have a small ssh server running as part of initrd. I think it's dropbear. I log into that and unlock the root drive from there.
Of course that necessitates an unencrypted /boot/.
Did it on Debian and it was relatively easy to set up.
Files could be decrypted by the end user. The OS itself could remain unencrypted.
How do you even encrypt a server so that it doesn’t require human intervention every time it goes down/restarts?
The only time my Server goes down, is when i manually reboot it. So waiting a minute or two, to ssh into it and entering the passphrase is no inconvenience.
I remember this blog post (I cannot find right now) where the person split the decryption password in two: half stored on the server itself and half on a different http server. And there was an init script which downloaded the second half to decrypt the drive. There is a small window of time between when you realize that the server is stolen and when you take off the other half of the password where an attacker could decrypt your data. But if you want to protect from random thieves this should be safe enough as long as the two servers are in different locations and not likely to be stolen toghether.
TPM, but it’s a pain in the ass and breaks a lot. The new version of Ubuntu should handle it better, but if you’re not on Ubuntu, that won’t help you.
TPM solves a sigthly different threat model: if you dispose the hd or if someone takes it out from your computer it is fully encrypted and safe. But if someone steals your whole server it can start and decrypt the drive. So you have to trust you have good passwords and protection for each service you run. depending on what you want to protect for this is either great solution or sub optimal
Use Clevis either with TPM or Tang (remote server) https://github.com/latchset/clevis
TPM is a good way, Mine is setup to have encryption of / via TPM with luks so it can boot no issues, then actual sensitive data like the /home/my user is encrypted using my password and the backup system + fileserver is standard luks with password.
This setup allows for unassisted boot up of main systems (such as SSH) which let's you sign in to manually unlock more sensative drives.
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.
Always, if nothing else it makes "wiping" them securely easier.
I used to until I realized that I’ve got bigger threats to worry about.
And like someone else mentioned, if I have to do data recovery for some unknown reason I want to make sure the data’s not encrypted.
Why? If you store the key in your password manager shouldn't be a problem to mount the drive on another PC, decrypt it and save data. Or am I missing something?
Recovering data from a corrupted, encrypted drive is way trickier than from a simply corrupted drive, I imagine.
I use full disk encryption for every server (and other computers).
Encrypting your data drives is a must for everyone imho. Encrypting the OS is a must for me🤷♂️
It's a relatively low performance hit and it benefits me when having to replace a failing/old disk. I can just toss the drive without having to erase the data first, that is as long as the key is a secure length.
I encrypt devices that are portable. If someone raids my house I have bigger fish to fry.
If someone raids my house I have bigger fish to fry. Sure, but if it's "free", why not do it? My main worry was about performances, but since I've read that with AES-NI it doesn't impact that much and since it seems not to be that complicated (let's hope! 😁).
No. If someone gets to my server that’ll be the least of my worries.
Yes.
My home server has dropbear-initramfs installed so that after reboot I can access the LUKS decryption prompt over SSH. The one LUKS partition contains a btrfs filesystem with both rootfs and home as subvolumes. For all the other drives attached to that system, I use ZFS native encryption with a dataset that decrypts with a keyfile from that rootfs and I have backups of an encrypted copy of that keyfile.
I don't think there's a substantial performance impact but I've never bothered benchmarking.
In addition to "encryption at rest", also consider that your devices might be exploited over the internet, so attackers may be able to access the decrypted state that way. To guard against that, you may wish to encrypt certain documents with an additional password, even if they are sitting on an encrypted file system.
Recall that within a month, the widely SSH was exploited and a backdoor added to every machine. I had upgraded to that SSH version. I didn't run an SSH server on that box, but it goes to show that even those who take precautions can end up exploited!
The XZ vulnerability was stopped in its tracks and did not really affect the majority of systems.
I also have a hard time believing local file encryption can be that effective. All they need to do is capture your keystrokes.
It’s defense in depth. If I encrypt a rarely used file, capturing my keystrokes will eventually work, but it might be weeks or months before I return to decrypt that file. In the meantime, I might have realized I was hacked and restore the system.
That's why I use most of the services via Wireguard (except Nextcloud that is behind Cloudflare and MQTTs that's completely exposed)
On laptops yes, on my server no. Most of the data is photo backups and linux ISOs form over the years.
No. I run my servers on low quality shit and I expect them to break any time. Never had to perform a data recovery but if I need, I'll thank myself I didn't encrypt my pics
Power user move!
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?
Yes, all, no matter what data is, it's not hard and doesn't have any consequences, but protects from many inconvenient accidents
No
Yup and negligible. If I'm forced to contend with a windows environment bitlocker is utilized.
I also utilize a ram disk in a windows os. Imdisk in windows. I migrate temp files and logs into the ram disk. It saves on disk writes and increases privacy.
If pretty straightforward to encrypt if utilizing Linux right from install time.
As for my server I too utilize nextcloud. However, the nextcloud data is on a zfs dataset. This dataset is encrypted.
I did this by installing nextcloud from docker running within a proxmox container. That proxmox lxc container has the nextcloud dataset passed into it.
I did this by installing nextcloud from docker running within a proxmox container. That proxmox lxc container has the nextcloud dataset passed into it.
That's almost what I'm doing (I'm using a VM in Proxmox where I install all my Docker containers). Right now I'm thinking about encrypt only the data volume (a NFS share from Proxmos host) since all the sensible data will be there.
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)
I did have LUKS and a USB flash drive with a key to be inserted on boot. It was definitely difficult and caused performance issues. It was particularly difficult to add/remove drives from the array. These days I only encrypt my off-site backups that sit at the office where my coworkers potentially have physical access.
There have been recent advancements in TPM so disk encryption is easier to maintain and doesn't affect performance. I'll need to investigate this one day. My server/NAS is a 4th-gen i5, so it may not support the functions I would need. Full disk encryption will land in Ubuntu soon. I'm hanging out for that.
I want to, but haven't found the time to make a strategy on how to move over the data. It would take a bunch of shuffling as all drives are in use. The next problem is decrypting at boot and securely storing the decryption key - if I choose to use a decryption key at all. Maybe it'll be a usb key that I have to plug into the server when starting it, or I have to setup decryption of the system over SSH, but that means automated restarts are... difficult.
Not sure how to tackle the problem yet...
I use separate disks for data storage and my OS. That way a headless system can boot and all the services like SSH can become available, and I can decrypt the data drives remotely.
When there's an unexpected reboot I can still get into my system and decrypt remotely which is nice. I can also move the data storage disks to another system without too much hassle.
I did have to make sure some services were fault tolerant if an encrypted volume was unavailable when the OS booted. An example of this might be torrenting software, I needed to make sure the temporary storage was on an encrypted volume. The software had a sane fault mode when the final storage location was unavailable, but freaked out for some reason when the temp storage was missing.
Once set up the whole thing is pretty easy to manage.
I did have to make sure some services were fault tolerant if an encrypted volume was unavailable when the OS booted
How did you achieve that? systemd dependency?
on my NAS i do and work data as well.
I don't do anything that warrants it, but if I did have sensitive data that I was worried about being stolen, those drives would be in a system completely cut off from the Internet to prevent remote theft, and encrypted in the event of a physical theft. If I was especially paranoid, I'd booby trap the drives to wipe themselves if they are tampered with.
Use Cryptomator to have your data safe from prying eyes.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| LVM | (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping |
| MQTT | Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NFS | Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
| Zigbee | Wireless mesh network for low-power devices |
12 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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Anyone who says yes is either a professional in a field already requiring it (is aware of how to do it and what it means), retired (has unlimited time to tinker), or is Edward Snowden. For the average person, you don't need to encrypt your disks.
Well, since I've discovered that with AES-NI it doesn't impact performances, I don't see why not do it. I've had a look at a couple of guides and it doesn't seem to be so difficult