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.
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 aesshould probably tell you what you need to know.If you don’t have hardware encryption you can use
--cipher xchacha20,aes-adiantumoption when runningcryptsetupto make it way faster than standard aes cipher in software.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.
That’s pretty much my ThinkPad’s Specs. Fine for almost all stuff I have to do on the go (expect CAD, don’t try to run BricsCAD on the thing, it’ll make you go crazy.)
I use full disk encryption on it, as on all my other devices, and it’s fine, speed-wise. The SSD is NVME, not SATA, but I doubt the performance impact would be noticeable on a SATA SSD if that’s what you’ve got.
mine’s m.2 too. I tried systemd-homed, as of now it doesn’t work as it should. Next I’ll try disk/partition one but it’d be great to encrypt when sleeping, it’s fine if it’s hibernation
You said you’re on Arch, you’ll want to go through their docs which are solid: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system
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.
That is absolutely not a slow laptop. If it takes a long time to boot there must be something wrong. I have a similar system that takes about ten seconds to boot.
Anyways, like others said, LVM with LUKS is the simplest. It uses your hardware to quickly decrypt the drive on boot. While it is running access to your data is protected by your login manager or lock screen.