Dr. Underground - 2022-04-16

This post evolved as I made sure to gather info on my own as much as I can. This has turned into a story of how I did this rather than the technical question I was about to ask

For a long time I was using a bash script to mount multiple encrypted volumes with minimal password input. I was grabbing the password at the start of the script into a variable and using that in my mount commands. I liked it for the most part except I was finding the the plaintext passwords listed in the task list when using ps aux or htop.

I knew that if I ran the mount commands on their own, veracrypt would prompt for the passwords, and they wouldn't show in ps aux. I just didn't want to type in the password 6 times.

It took me a while of reading forum posts but i settled on utilizing favorites to mount these, and letting the password cache feature auto mount all the volumes that shared that password.

I found in a previous topic the setting for Cache Passwords in Memory under Settings > Preference. I checked this box.

It took me the longest to figure out the linux command for auto mount. The initial help text that pops up when there is an error was not helpful to tell me what parameter it was looking for with "--auto-mount=<str>". I eventually found in the command line documentation to use veracrypt -h to see the command line options for linux. I expected to see the same thing I was already seeing, but I did it anyway and found some slightly different instructions. My command to mount favorites now is</str>

veracrypt --auto-mount=favorites

It is a little slower than the way I was previously doing this, but I no longer have the passwords visible when checking on running tasks. Hoping this is helpful having a recent topic with this linux command listed in it.

I am using Veracrypt 1.24-Update 7 and Debian 11.