On 01/04/2009 09:03 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:
Hmm - Is there no reasonably safe way of doing this? There seems to be some risk with everything. I've not lost a usb stick yet, but one can never guarantee that one won't.
The general recomendation for any laptop (with anything sufficiently private) is to encrypt the disk. My preference is to (luks) encrypt /home and swap and then bind mount /tmp and /var/tmp out of /home/tmp /home/var/tmp. You could encrypt root as well and then skip the bind mounts.
Many (if not most) businesses these days require laptops all be encrypted - certainly mine does. (See some posts by mike.cloaked on encryption in F10)
Avoid any fuse type encryptions - nice toys to test things but they are very slow. Using encryption (encfs is the default in Luks) does not impact my daily activities at all speed wise, tho' backup/restores may be a little slower. Witrh encrypted swap you likely cannot hibernate tho suspend may be an option - I usually just shutdown and reboot.
In addition, as Tom mentioned, you likely use a passphrase to protect your ssh private key (and like most of us probably use ssh-agent so you dont need to keep typing it).
gene/