Red Hat started to implement encryption of the entire file system, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 onwards.

This encryption of the entire file system's is a much better way to secure the data on the disk. This is an added advantage for people who are prone to using mobile devices for their day to day work. The main advantage is that, even if the entire disk is lost, your data cannot be easily accessed as it is encrypted and requires a pass phrase key to access the data inside. Red hat implements this through LUKS.

What is LUKS?
LUKS stands for Linux Unified Key Setup. LUKS enables the facility to encrypt a whole partition in Linux for security purposes. LUKS was initially created by Clemens Fruhwirth. The main added advantage of using LUKS for encryption over other encryption technologies is that it is platform independent. In short you can call LUKS as a standard for implementing encryption of file system's in Linux.

What does LUKS do?

Block devices can be encrypted using LUKS. And LUKS does not bother about the data inside the block device, because of which you can encrypt any kind of partition(even swap) using LUKS. In order to access the contents of an encrypted file system using LUKS the user is required to provide a pass phrase for the key which intern will be used to unlock the file system. LUKS takes the help of dm-crypt module to access Linux Kernel Device Mapper. In order to create an encrypted partition or access the encrypted partition, cryptsetup utility is used by the users.

What are the Limitations of LUKS?

Encryption upto the level of files cannot be done using LUKS It has got a limit regarding the no of users, that can have different passwords in order to access the same block device.

How to encrypt a partition using LUKS?

Red Hat Enterprise linux provides you an interface to encrypt the partitions during the installation time, which is quite easy. In this tutorial we will be seeing how can we create a new partition and encrypt it using LUKS. I will be using CentOS 5.8 for this example tutorial. You can easily do the same in Red Hat enterprise Linux and also in Centos(and many other distributions.) For this tutorial i will be creating a Logical Volume of 5gb and will encrypt that volume, with the help of LUKS. [root@myvm ~]# lvcreate -L 5G -n myvolume VolGroup00 Logical volume "myvolume" created So my device which i just created is /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume. We will be encrypting this volume. I have created a logical volume just for this example, you can use any of the newly created partition, you want. Like /dev/sda1, /dev/sda3 etc. The next step that we need to do is to format the device with cryptsetup utility and make the device LUKS encrypted. [root@myvm /]# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/mapper/VolGroup00myvolume WARNING! ======== This will overwrite data on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume irrevocably.

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES Enter LUKS passphrase: Verify passphrase: Command successful. You can replace "/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume" with whatever the partition you are going to encrypt with LUKS. The above cryptsetup command will ask for a confirmation, because this will destroy any data you have on the partition. Then you are prompted for a passphrase. Now lets see some detailed information about the encryption on our device /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume . [root@myvm ~]# cryptsetup luksDump /dev/mapper/VolGroup00myvolume LUKS header information for /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume Version: 1 Cipher name: aes Cipher mode: cbc-essiv:sha256 Hash spec: sha1 Payload offset: 1032 MK bits: 128 MK digest: 4f 4a 2e 9e 7e 04 44 e5 29 3e 6d d7 9e 56 17 2f 9f 5c bf 42 MK salt: a1 e5 ba 61 ce e9 48 7b 60 7e f2 e3 c5 61 53 22 f6 0b b2 8f ff 02 5f 56 62 0b 3d 3a 0f 7c c3 04 MK iterations: 10 UUID: a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 Key Slot 0: ENABLED Iterations: Salt:

Key Key Key Key Key

311917 d4 3e f3 37 5d 89 62 be d5 ab ee 27 de 17 b7 f8 cf 88 47 bf ab eb 2e 62 69 86 77 72 bc 26 a8 ed Key material offset: 8 AF stripes: 4000 Slot 1: DISABLED Slot 2: DISABLED Slot 3: DISABLED Slot 4: DISABLED Slot 5: DISABLED

Key Slot 6: DISABLED Key Slot 7: DISABLED You can clearly see from the above output that we are using aes encryption with sha256. Now lets see how are we going to access this newly encrypted device. Or in otherwords how will the kernel's device mapper recognize this encrypted partition of ours. You can get the UUID of the newly encrypted device as shown below. [root@myvm ~]# cryptsetup luksUUID /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 Now We will assign a device mapping name to this device as shown below. [root@myvm ~]# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 Enter LUKS passphrase for /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume: key slot 0 unlocked. Command successful. Now You will have a device named "luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3" in /dev/mapper. Also the above command luksOpen will depcrypt the filesystem so that it can be accessed [root@myvm mapper]# cd /dev/mapper/ ; ls control VolGroup00-LogVol01 luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 VolGroup00-myvolume VolGroup00-LogVol00 Please do remember that the device is open and accessible as of now because we ran "cryptsetup luksopen" command at the time of giving it a device mapping name. Now lets format our device in the same way we format our normal partitions. [root@myvm mapper]# mke2fs -j /dev/mapper/luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) 655360 inodes, 1310591 blocks 65529 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user First data block=0

Maximum filesystem blocks=1342177280 40 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 16384 inodes per group Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736 Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done This filesystem will be automatically checked every 32 mounts or 180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override. Now Lets mount this device, as normal. [root@myvm ~]# mount /dev/mapper/luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 /mypartition/ Now lets check and confirm whether our LUKS formatted and encrypted device is mounted properly with df -h command. [root@myvm ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 31G 2.7G 27G 10% / /dev/sda1 99M 13M 82M 13% /boot tmpfs 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 5.0G 139M 4.6G 3% /mypartition We can clearly see from the last line of the above output that our newly mapped encrypted device is mounted under /mypartition

How to umount and Lock back the LUKS encrypted partition

First lest umount the partition as normal..and then lock back the filesystem through cryptsetup.

[root@myvm ~]# umount /dev/mapper/luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b52d3080e9fe3 [root@myvm ~]# cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/luks-a8ac8a06-baf84dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 The first command above unmounts and the second command locks back the filesystem.

How to Unlock and mount LUKS encrypted Partition

Now you can again unlock and mount as shown below,whenever required. But will ask for the passphrase. [root@myvm ~]# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 Enter LUKS passphrase for /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myvolume: key slot 0 unlocked. Command successful. [root@myvm ~]# mount /dev/mapper/luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b52d3080e9fe3 Note: luks-a8ac8a06-baf8-4dbc-9c2b-52d3080e9fe3 is just a convention that we follow for identifying the device with the UUID. You can use anything instead of that...But you will need to give that name whenever you mount.