Monday, January 22, 2007

Migration to Linux - Disk Encryption


I've been using TrueCrypt on Windows for my disk encryption needs for a while now, and chose it in part due to its multi-platform capabilities. Now that I'm dual-booting between Windows XP and Ubuntu (although rarely switching back to Windows), I needed a way to access the same encrypted disk from both OS's. Fortuneately, TrueCrypt exceeds my needs.

I downloaded the package for my Linux distribution (Ubuntu), installed the dmsetup dependency, then truecrypt:
apt-get install dmsetup
dpkg -i truecrypt_4.2a-0_i386.deb

Create the directory where I want my encrypted disk mounted:
sudo mkdir /media/crypt

Now all will work fine but I'll need to mount the encrypted disk via sudo which will give permissions to root. My user id needs read & write access, so I need to make sure the user id bit is set on the truecrypt binary:
chmod u+s /usr/bin/truecrypt

All good, now I can mount the encrypted disk file located on my mounted NTFS partition:
truecrypt -u /media/ntfs/crypt /media/crypt

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