I know this is a meme, but security is not binary. It is not you either have 100% or 0%, it is always a sliding scale, and usually on the opposite side is convenience.
Encrypting your drive protects against someone stealing your computer or breaning into youe house while the computer is off/locked.
People like to trash people that write down their passwords on a post-it note and keep next to their computer. It is not ideal, but having a somewhat complex password written down protects a lot more against attacks over the internet than having “password”. However, if others have physical access to the note then it is obviously very bad. Like for example in an office.
Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.
One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.
I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )
Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.
Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.
I don’t like how writing down passwords on notes has been heavily criminalized. Obviously it’s a security risk, but so is having a simple password that isn’t written down anywhere. In fact, the latter is often more dangerous, depending on the specific environment. Just make sure the note isn’t easily accessible and you’re good.
Yes. Writting down a complex password helps against most attacks, except one where the bad guy has physical access to your note. Based on the normal users use case that is probably a very good trade off. Most hacks are done over the internet without access to your note.
Ideally everyone should use a password manager, but that is highly unlikely any time soon.
i work in IT at an office and i kid you not. some people really stick a post it with their full login to their screen. (not even their screen as they sit at different places every day)
On a single user system which either hibernates or shuts fully down you might as well long in automatically after you type in your 16 character encryption pass phrase. A login screen does not in any way provide additional security. Note this doesn’t actually prevent you from locking the screen and unlocking still requires your password.
But I think ‘encrypt home directory’ only encrypts your home partition, not your root partition. Not sure why many distros offer only this option in the graphical installer
encrypt your home directory stated as such doesn’t mean encrypt ANY partition. Distros that offer this normally use ecryptfs. encrypting your partition uses LUKS. They use ecryptfs because its easy and doesn’t effect the boot up process. Full disk (or partition) uses LUKS
Is there any OS that allows this config?
At least with Linux, if I encrypt my hard drive, I have to enter my encryption password on every login, for some even during boot.
Not sure about Windows. I wpuldn’t be surprised if you can have bitdefender on with auto login.
From memory yes but the contents of your home directory are inaccessible until you enter your password via a popup. For whole drive encryption probably not.
I had configured this manually (incorrectly) in Arch a while back to have my home dir be on a separate encrypted drive.
Turns out the main drive didn’t get the memo and still had a home folder which worked fine, I thought it was working so I promptly forgot about it. Meanwhile the encrypted drive (which had only ever been unlocked that day and never again) had maybe 10 files on it that I didn’t even know it had until I swapped the drive into a different PC.
The password for the hard drive encryption and the system login are two separate things, so, yes, this combination is easily possible. You’ll have to input a password for system bootup, but not for logging in.
How advisable that combination is is another question entirely.
Can do full disk encryption of root and auto-unlock with tpm, the auto-login is a separate thing and not necessarily the same password
You could configure the TPM to effectively store the LUKS key. User login is skippable. So yes, should be possible.
You can have FDE binded to the TMP and then inside that encrypted volume an encrypted home.
By doing that you only need to input your login password and get better security than the meme setup and other suggestions.
You would need, iirc (I am typing this from memory):
- A TPM.
systemd-cryptenroll- Some PAM config for fscrypt or similar.
I know the steps but for NixOS only lmao.
Mine autodecrypts with a hardcoded password in a text file. I don’t really care about encryption right now, but the minute I do, it’s one file delete away.
In Linux, Unlock the partition with secret key (easy) and skip login (easy). Overall: easy.
By default, you never have to enter your BitLocker passphrase, since there’s usually no passphrase in the first place. The default configuration unlocks the drive automatically as long as it’s on the same network it was set up with. Otherwise you need the recovery key. You can also manually enable an unlock method, though on modern PCs there’s usually only PIN available.
On Linux, in theory you can have the exact same setup and nothing’s stopping you. However, depending on the distro it may or may not be easily configured. You can fairly easily set up automatic drive unlock with TPM, which essentially gives you a similar experience to the default BitLocker.
I mean login automatically on boot but with encrypted drive is ok if you’re the only user. If someone got your encryption password, they can get your data. The user password doesn’t protect a shit
Now of course you want to still have auth when locking the pc
Depends on your threat model. If you are defending against people stealing your hard drive and reading your data, then this is perfectly fine.
I don’t really bother encrypting my personal PC, there’s just not much on there at all that I even store. My server is definitely LUKS encrypted, but it’s a lot of effort for a very specific attack vector that I don’t anticipate. There’s things I’d be much more concerned about a burglar stealing than a storage device.
Just do full disk encryption + autologin. Done
Me logging in automatically but having my lockscreen autostart when my window manager starts (i just do it because it makes the login transition smoother compared to a display manager, and i’m the only person who uses my pc anyway).
