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! 🤷🏻♂️
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?
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.
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.
No. If someone gets to my server that’ll be the least of my worries.
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
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 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…
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!
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.
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Dude just use a hammer
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.
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)
How are you certain all your porn is legal?
I think we both understand the intention behind my statement
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.
On laptops yes, on my server no. Most of the data is photo backups and linux ISOs form over the years.
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.
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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Always, if nothing else it makes “wiping” them securely easier.
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, all, no matter what data is, it’s not hard and doesn’t have any consequences, but protects from many inconvenient accidents
