>> Securing the system is exactly the same thing IMHO.
>>
>> If your system is insecure then encryption won't help, the attacker will
>> get all your passwords and happily decrypt all your data!
> I would argue that it depends on what you are securing against.
For
> example, securing data against physical laptop theft does not really
> require booting from removable media...as long as you don't trust the
> laptop once it is recovered.
True. But what about servers? How secure is YOUR server room? Taking
disks out etc is not difficult to do. Replacing the BIOS on the
motherboard
adds an extra level of difficulty and the risk is decreased if that
is what
an attacker would be forced to do.
You are entirely right. Again, my point is that it depends what you are
securing against. I don't have a server room. I am interested in securing
my laptop. The important thing is that, as these techniques are developed,
we are straight forward with and aware of the precise things they defend
against.
> However, if you are requiring a physical token to provide a key
then
> booting from that token is not too much of a leap. Assuming your firmware
> supports booting from, say, USB. This seems outside the scope of mkinitrd
> and more a responsibility of properly configuring yaboot, lilo, grub, etc.
You need the initrd to be able to mount an encrypted root fs, so there are
some changes to initrd needed. They are probably more significant than the
changes to allow booting from a USB device.
Yes. I am already working on modifying mkinitrd (see elsewhere in this
thread). So, as I mentioned, once mkinitrd/initrd supports encrypted root
filesystems and accessing a key on a removable device then booting from that
same device should be simple.
--
Mike