October 01, 2013

USB Flash Drive encryption with LUKS

LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is a disk-encryption specification created by Clemens Fruhwirth and originally intended for Linux. If you would like to encrypt your USB Flash Drive, here is How-to for you.

Make sure that you have device-mapper encryption/decryption module

lsmod |grep -i dm_crypt
dm_crypt               11084  2

List kernel supported encryption algorithms

cat /proc/crypto | grep name
name         : ecb(arc4)
name         : arc4
name         : xts(aes)
name         : xts(aes)
name         : aes
name         : aes
name         : stdrng
name         : crc32c
name         : sha1
name         : md5

Encrypting your USB Flash Drive

Let’s say you have your USB Flash Drive at /dev/sdb

Check for badblocks (DANGER! -w flag is for writing test)

/sbin/badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb

Filling with random data (takes time…)

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=4k $ pid=$!

To check how many data written (it will not kill your dd)

kill -USR1 $pid          // or # kill -SIGUSR1

Encrypt flash disk

cryptsetup luksFormat -c "aes-xts-plain64" --key-size 512 -y /dev/sdb

Make sure it’s encrypted

cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb

Open the LUKS device

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb sdbvol

Format it to your desirable FS

mkfs.ext4 -v /dev/mapper/sdbvol

Sync & Close volume

sync ; sync && cryptsetup luksClose sdbvol

Testing

Open the LUKS device and map it to sdbvol

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb sdbvol

Create directory and mount your volume

mkdir /mnt/sdb
mount /dev/mapper/sdbvol /mnt/sdb/

Now your USB Flash Drive is mounted on /mnt/sdb/ and you can write data there.

When you finish work, unmount FS and close volume

umount /mnt/sdb/ ; sync
cryptsetup luksClose sdbvol

Changing Luks password

Create new key (slot 1)

cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sdb

Remove old key (slot 0)

cryptsetup luksDelKey /dev/sdb 0

Luks supports up to 8 passwords/keys for the same volume