2009/8/21 Peter Brooks <peter@???>:
> After a friend has had his full spec macbook pro 15" stolen from his
> house, I'm considering beefing up my laptop security.
> My initial thoughts are to encrypt /home,/tmp and swapspace. But to
> ideally that when the computer is locked (gnome) then the volume is
> re-encrypted until it's locked.
> The other side of the security I suppose would be tracking the laptop
> whilst stolen.
>
We talked about this in the podcast [0] [1] recently.
I decided to encrypt using ecryptfs the files in my personal home (not
the entire home partition) and have a guest account that autologs in
after 60 seconds. It has little access to anything but can get online
if required. Installing software such as Prey [2] can be useful for
tracking your laptop after it's been stolen - assuming it can get
online to report itself stolen and upload technical details about
where it is.
Ecrpytfs [3] can be setup post-install, you don't have to reinstall
everything to do it, but it's time consuming to go through he process
of encrypting all your files (assuming you have a lot of them). The
other option is to use an encrypted private directory and store
selected data in there, even going as far as browser profile and
email.
Cheers,
Al.
[0]
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2009/07/07/s02e08-the-stolen-earth/
[1]
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2009/07/23/s02e09-the-dimensions-of-time/
[2]
http://preyproject.com/
[3]
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/06/migrating-to-encrypted-home-directory.html
