Securing your RasPi and external HDD's/USB drives.

[jell0zz]

Hey guys,

I was looking into the option to lock an external HDD or USB drive with just a simple password. Similar to how you use a password to log in to your user.

However, there seems to be no real solution. Almost every solution i have encountered needs a computer side client to unlock the client on the drive.

What I would love is a way to just plug in the drive, let the window pop up which tells you it is locked and it needs a password. Put it in, and the window gets unlocked.

Now, my question is, is there anything like that out there?

Locking your devices is something I believe is quite important as you wouldn't leave your house unlocked why would you leave your external hdd with personal finance information etc unlocked.

Cheers, Jelle

[jamesh]

For decent disk security you would really need whole disk encryption. Not sure what's available on Linux although PGP do something on Windows.

[jamesh]

Forgot to add, if you only have a few files you want securing rather than the whole disk, try Truecrypt.

[jell0zz]

No, its really all about securing the entire drive.

Otherwise you would have to encrypt every single new file manually.

Where as if the drive is 'locked' its more like a cupboard with a lock on it, you can put anything in it and you just lock it so nobody can touch it without the key or password.

[rmm200]

Best to make sure, if the drive is locked, every byte written is encrypted. Otherwise easy enough to stick a new controller board on the drive and have access to everything.

[jell0zz]

rmm200 said:


Best to make sure, if the drive is locked, every byte written is encrypted. Otherwise easy enough to stick a new controller board on the drive and have access to everything.



haha, i just want my relatives to keep their hands of it.

and none of them will go that far

[jamesh]

You could just have one big truecrypt volume on the drive and put everything in that.

[jell0zz]

JamesH said:


You could just have one big truecrypt volume on the drive and put everything in that.



yea but that way truecrypt needs to be on all pc's right? and it deletes everything currently on the hdd right?

[dukla2000]

Lots of Linux options. I haven't tried any of them but, for example, Ext4 has an option in the format to encrypt the partition.

[AndrewS]

jell0zz said:



However, there seems to be no real solution. Almost every solution i have encountered needs a computer side client to unlock the client on the drive.

What I would love is a way to just plug in the drive, let the window pop up which tells you it is locked and it needs a password. Put it in, and the window gets unlocked.


If you have no computer-side client installed, then what exactly do you expect this "pop-up window" to be displayed by??

Basically there's no such thing as a "simple lock" - you need to have everything on the drive encrypted, either with a "container" like TrueCrypt (or similar), or a "filesystem" like eCrpytfs (or similar).

I believe you can get external USB HDs where the encryption is all done by the drive-controller itself, in which case you wouldn't need client software, but these are usually very expensive.

After some googling I found http://blogs.computerworld.com.....ard_drives