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! 🤷🏻♂️
No
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!
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
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🤷♂️
My PC weighs 80+ lbs, live 8km from town, surrounded by farm land and there are only 3,400 in town and I live 30 min from a city of 40,000 and 40 min from another city of 70,000 and my internet is 20/10 mbps
What’s your point?
I think he is saying that his physical attack surface is very small since he is remote, so maybe he doesn’t bother?
Either way, encrypting drives is simply always good if you ever resell the computer or upgrade drives.
FreeAin’t no one stealing my shit, even via internet to upload 40tb would take 1 year 5 days at max speed in actuality it would be 1 year 8 months… Fuck I miss my 1.5G fibre connection…
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
No. If someone gets to my server that’ll be the least of my worries.
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.
I’m surprized as well, like I guess I would understand if it’s a no log DNS server but, what else wouldn’t have sensitive information.
My Music, Movies and Shows, I dont consider them private/sensitive, as they aren’t illegal to possess or even download in my country. I would even donate my filled but corrupted drive to a repair guy, he can have the media if he can repair it.
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.
Use Cryptomator to have your data safe from prying eyes.
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?
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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Yes, all, no matter what data is, it’s not hard and doesn’t have any consequences, but protects from many inconvenient accidents
Always, if nothing else it makes “wiping” them securely easier.
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)
Good question. I don’t have a clue either. It doesn’t contain any personal information. (Unless it’s self-made.) Usually isn’t unique. And nobody cares as there’s an abundance of porn available everywhere on the internet.
How are you certain all your porn is legal?
I think we both understand the intention behind my statement
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)
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.
Why? What would be the problem?
P.s. Why did you link to the Anti Commercial-AI license?
The way you recover data from a totally dead drive is use a program that scans every byte and looks for structures in the data that look like files e.g. a jpeg will have a header followed by some blocks of content. In an encrypted drive everything looks like random data.
Even if you have the key, you can’t begin searching through the data until it’s decrypted, and the kind of error that makes it so your drive won’t mount normally is likely to get in the way of decrypting normally as well.
Why? What would be the problem?
On linux, you’re probably using LUKS. That has a header with the keys at the beginning of each encrypted volume. If those keys (or key if you only have one) is corrupted and you don’t have a backup of that, you’re fucked.
The next problem is that data recovery tools mostly don’t support decryption. They scan regions or the entire drive for recognizable things like partition headers, partition tables, file types, etc. if those are encrypted, well…
If you are able to decrypt a partition, then it might work as it will show up like any other device in
/dev/mapper/and you could dorecovery /dev/mapper/HDD. However, I have no idea what data corruption does to encryption algorithms. If one part of what is being decrypted is faulty, what does that do to the entire thing?
This mostly comes from a lack of knowledge on my part. IIRC encryption depends on hashsums -> if you change what’s being decrypted/encrypted, the entire hashsum is incorrect and thus all the data shouldn’t be able to be decrypted. But I might be wrong - I’ll gladly be wrong on this.On linux, you’re probably using LUKS. That has a header with the keys at the beginning of each encrypted volume. If those keys (or key if you only have one) is corrupted and you don’t have a backup of that, you’re fucked.
I got it, thanks! I will rely on SnapRaid form redundancy and on backups on multiple devices/locations.
