How secure is encryption by means of Disk Utility (palimpsest) in ubantu OS

[Biswanath1]

hi guys, i wanted some change in the operating system so decided to choice ubantu for a time interval.. OK but i am not knowing much about these operating system and wanted to know from you guys about some problems which are occurring with me. recently i encrypted a hard disk by means of Disk Utility. What algorithm is it encrypted by now? is it safe to use . i want to know in addition for which things i should make concern of. .thanks..

[Jezriah]

Hi,i could say about this as i researched on it and found that according to me Palimpsest makes use of Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) which i think is a specification with disk encryption . The reference implementation for LUKS is based on an improved or can say superior version of cryptsetup and quite often works on Linux . and i think thsi information will prove to be helpful in your case.

[Dhulipala]

i am having a similar question in my mind and and doubt for something. i want to know that when we make use of luks/cryptsetup/dm-crypt from terminal you tend to have lot of alternatives to make a choice when we concern specifically with the algorithm. i can state a few as the key length,and etc. i am therefore of the question that at the time of doing it form the Disk Utility it just states you that it is in the "encrypted" form.

[aSITA]

according to me i suppose it should be possibly AES-256, which is likely to be much standard and secure symmetric algorithm when we concern with the normal users to have it. . I typically make use of AES-128 as it will tend to be bit faster than 256 and to my concern i think it will prove more secure than others. i can say only one thing that you should take into consideration is to make sure your key which generally means pass phrase is kept secret and is which will tend difficult to identify.

[Evoldo]

when you come across security issue , according to my knowledge it has made me clear that your passphrase is always the weakest part that you take into note of. There's no requirement to worry about the cipher, mode, or hash;as they prove to be more secure than the others and there security level is very high when we make comparison with the others. hope this will get an adequate information about this point.

[Biswanath1]

yeah, i can get what you are saying but i want to know how faster is AES-128 when we make a comparison with AES-256. i had previously known from somewhere that the passphrase is the weakest part. but i would make my knowledge stronger if i would further know about what is the encryption+hash+salt+keystrenghening that palimpsest makes use of.its just easy to make use of encryption and Ubuntu makes it easy in this case, and it sure its better than and more user-friendly compared to Windows.

[Clarice]

yes. definitely. i can state some points which i think will be more useful in your case.

and i can say here that It's AES-256 which is more better than any other for sure. At least, that's what I get on my partition encrypted with palimpsest.
You can have a re-check of this if you concern with some doubt .

1. have a creation of an encrypted partition by means of making use of palimpsest
2. make use of palimpsest so that you are able to unlock it and then mount it.
3. make use of the `mount` command (no parameters) to locate which device in /dev/mapper corresponds to your encrypted partition
4. finally Run the code.

sudo cryptsetup status /dev/mapper/$UR_ENCRYPTED_DEVICE

[Clarice]

thanks for your replies as it was able to sort out for me. i got the following solution after you mentioned the right procedure.

/dev/mapper/udisks-luks-uuid-0353e1b0-b793-4667-8d21-c39eaacc0b55-uid1000 is active:
cipher: aes-cbc-essiv:sha256
keysize: 256 bits
device: /dev/sdb6
offset: 2056 sectors
size: 33552376 sectors
mode: read/write