My laptop isn’t under my supervision most of the time. And I’d hate it if someone were to steal my SSD, or whole laptop even, when I’m not around. Is there a way to encrypt everything, but still keep the device in sleep, and unclock it without much delay. It’s a very slow laptop. So decryption on login isn’t viable, takes too long. While booting up also takes forever, so it needs to be in a “safe” state when simply logged out. Maybe a way that’s decrypt-on-demand?

I’m on Arch with KDE.

  • bruhbeans@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    How old are we talking? If the CPU is >10 years old and/or some kind of ARM, it may not have hardware encryption acceleration, which means it’ll happen in software. I did that once, it was horrible. lscpu |grep -i aes should probably tell you what you need to know.

    • UnRelatedBurner@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      It does give me a result so I do have “aes”. How can I use it?

      We’re talking an Intel i5-8350U. it has 16GBs of ram and 500GB of SSD.

      • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s not a slow laptop. I’ve been daily driving worse for years.

        To protect the data from random thief just browsing through the files I still use ecryptfs. It only encrypts the home directory, and the keys are derived from my accounts password, so no extra hassle.

        The encryption is weak by the current standards, and wouldn’t stop a determined attacker, but it’s 100% better than nothing, and I’ve never noticed any performance problems.

  • sudo@programming.dev
    0·
    1 year ago

    The standard route is to decrypt on boot. It happens after GRUB but before your display manager starts. IDK if there even is a setup that has you “decrypt on login”. Thats sounds like your display manager (sddm for KDE) is decrypting system which is not possible IMO.

    Unless your laptop somehow has multiple drives you’ll want to use the “LVM on LUKS” configuration. 1 small partition for /boot. The rest gets LUKS encrypted, and an LVM group is put on the LUKS container. Or you could replace LVM with btrfs.

    This will require wiping your system and reinstalling so you have some reading to do.

    The arch-install script in the live iso has options for full disk encryption.

    If you suspend to RAM your system will stay unencrypted, because your ram is not encrypted. if you suspend to disk (aka hibernate) your system will be encrypted. You go through the boot loader when waking from hibernation but it just drops you off where you left off.

    You need a swapfile for hibernation so make sure its inside the LUKS container.