Name | Modified | Size | Downloads / Week |
---|---|---|---|
cryptmount | 2023-01-07 | ||
INSTALL.md | 2022-09-24 | 6.8 kB | |
README.md | 2022-09-24 | 3.2 kB | |
Totals: 3 Items | 10.0 kB | 12 |
Cryptmount - user-mode management of Linux encrypted filesystems
cryptmount allows any user to access encrypted filing systems on demand under GNU/Linux systems running at least a 2.6-series kernel. It also assists the system administrator in creating and managing encrypted filesystems based on the kernel's dm-crypt device-mapper target.
After initial configuration by the superuser, an ordinary user can mount or unmount filesystems managed by cryptmount solely by providing the decryption password, with any system devices needed to access the filing system being configured automatically. A wide variety of encryption schemes (provided by the kernel and the libgcrypt library) can be used to protect both the filing system and the access key. The protected filing systems can reside in either ordinary files, or raw disk partitions.
Installation
To build cryptmount from source, please follow the instructions in the INSTALL.md file in the top directory of the source package.
cryptmount has been tested on a wide variety of GNU/Linux platforms including: ArchLinux, CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu etc.
For the most recent source-bundles of cryptmount, please see Sourceforge, or find the latest developer versions on GitHub.
An encrypted filing system must initially be created by the superuser.
A basic setup can be created interactively by running the cryptmount-setup
program, which is typically installed in /usr/local/sbin/
, and will
use the LUKS
encryption format by default.
More elaborate situations can be handled by manual editing of the
filesystem definition, typically in /etc/cryptmount/cmtab
or /usr/local/etc/cryptmount/cmtab
. For example, an entry of the form:
crypt {
dev=/home/crypt.fs dir=/mnt/crypt
fstype=ext4 mountoptions=defaults
keyformat=luks
}
Describes a LUKS-encrypted filesystem to be contained in an ordinary file,
and which will be mounted beneath /mnt/crypt
.
Such a filesystem could be initialized as follows:
test -e /home/crypt.fs || dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/crypt.fs bs=1M count=128
mkdir /mnt/crypt
cryptmount --generate-key 32 crypt
cryptmount --prepare crypt
mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/mapper/crypt
cryptmount --release crypt
Further details are available in the installed manual pages.
Thereafter, the following command, executed by an ordinary user, will make the filing system accessible below /mnt/crypt:
cryptmount crypt
and the following will unmount it:
cryptmount -u crypt
If using a separate keyfile, please take great care that you do not delete that file, as this will make access to your filesystem (essentially) impossible. You are strongly advised to keep a backup copy of the key-file.