observantTrapezium

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The fundamental difference between GPG encryption and encrypted partition is that of asymmetric vs. symmetric encryption. Whether you mount encrypted storage or decrypt a file with GPG, there’s some “effort” in putting in the passphrase and in both cases the system’s keyring is briefly aware of it and the plaintext is saved to memory (volatile, unless you have encrypted swap or other edge cases).

    Asymmetric encryption is not normally used for personal stuff but mostly to exchange material with one party holding the private key, and other having access to the public key (which is public). Of course you can act as both parties if you like. If you do, keep in mind:

    1. Asymmetric encryption algorithms may be vulnerable to quantum computing attacks in the coming years. There are quantum-resistant algorithms, but to my understanding they are not necessarily quantum-proof and could potentially be broken in the more distant future.
    2. If you do choose to use GPG, make sure that the plaintext never touches the disk, for example save it to /dev/shm before encryption.
    3. You can also protect your private key with a passphrase.

    Personally I use Joplin. On the clients it’s secure because the database is saved on encrypted storage secured by my login phrase. On the server it’s secure by Joplin encrypting the files saved to WebDAV storage. Is it 100% safe? Probably not, but probably good enough to stop all but a nation-state level actor.







  • Hey, hope you are recovering from this ordeal. I attribute some of the oddities in your post to panicked writing, but it would be great if you can clarify these points:

    listed as .BRM for windows 6

    What does that mean?

    As soon as they saw me, they wiped everything from my home folder, everything that wasn’t a base part of kde was gone

    What do you mean base part of KDE? Did they delete more than just the home directory?

    because since they schroot, none of those processes were available to me to view

    Why wouldn’t you be able to view processes running in schroot? Doesn’t it use the same pid namespace and uses the same /proc as the init process?

    I went digging and found the schroot under /run/ I took a look at the properties and the env showed 128.7TB of storage

    You wrote in a comment “that was the server farm rooted into me”. Why do you think that is the case?

    Also, it’s not quite clear what the screenshots are meant to show. The first two are a list of files in your home directory, showing it’s not empty. So did they wipe everything or not? How are we supposed to know what those files are and what you expect should be there… And then the other screenshots are of you trying to recover files from the disk image.

    I understand if you don’t, but do you actually have any evidence of an attack? Like cellphone video of the screen while you are seeing suspicious activity on Wireshark? I can definitely understand being more concerned with minimizing the damage once you realize files are being deleted than gathering evidence. But can you for example fish out that .dll file from the disk image?








  • I don’t really need the encryption

    In this case I’d say, LUKS is an overkill and just complicates your life. Try to think of a worst case scenario and what you are trying to protect against. Full disk encryption protects you against someone physically and clandestinely tampering with your server to compromise you by altering your OS, I’d say most selfhosters aren’t at risk of this (I do use LUKS on my laptop, because if I’m not available to decrypt the drive then there’s no reason for it to get decrypted). My approach to the server is to have encrypted directories as needed. For example the SFTP directory, the logic being that some of what’s there may be sensitive, so encryption at rest prevents leakage after the drive is eventually disposed of. But my Git repos (including private ones) and calendar aren’t encrypted at rest. Other services (e.g. Matrix, Borg, Vaultwarden) provide E2E so don’t really need further encryption.