dm-crypt ========= Device-Mapper's "crypt" target provides transparent encryption of block devices using the kernel crypto API. Parameters: \ [<#opt_params> ] Encryption cipher and an optional IV generation mode. (In format cipher-chainmode-ivopts:ivmode). Examples: des aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 twofish-ecb /proc/crypto contains supported crypto modes Key used for encryption. It is encoded as a hexadecimal number. You can only use key sizes that are valid for the selected cipher. The IV offset is a sector count that is added to the sector number before creating the IV. This is the device that is going to be used as backend and contains the encrypted data. You can specify it as a path like /dev/xxx or a device number :. Starting sector within the device where the encrypted data begins. <#opt_params> Number of optional parameters. If there are no optional parameters, the optional paramaters section can be skipped or #opt_params can be zero. Otherwise #opt_params is the number of following arguments. Example of optional parameters section: 1 allow_discards allow_discards Block discard requests (a.k.a. TRIM) are passed through the crypt device. The default is to ignore discard requests. WARNING: Assess the specific security risks carefully before enabling this option. For example, allowing discards on encrypted devices may lead to the leak of information about the ciphertext device (filesystem type, used space etc.) if the discarded blocks can be located easily on the device later. Example scripts =============== LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is now the preferred way to set up disk encryption with dm-crypt using the 'cryptsetup' utility, see http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/ [[ #!/bin/sh # Create a crypt device using dmsetup dmsetup create crypt1 --table "0 `blockdev --getsize $1` crypt aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 babebabebabebabebabebabebabebabe 0 $1 0" ]] [[ #!/bin/sh # Create a crypt device using cryptsetup and LUKS header with default cipher cryptsetup luksFormat $1 cryptsetup luksOpen $1 crypt1 ]]