this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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[Image description:
Screenshot of terminal output:

~ ❯ lsblk
NAME           MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sda              8:0    1  62.5M  0 disk  
└─topLuks      254:2    0  60.5M  0 crypt 
  └─bottomLuks 254:3    0  44.5M  0 crypt

/end image description]

I had no idea!

If anyone else is curious, it's pretty much what you would expect:

cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/sda
cryptsetup open /dev/sda topLuks
cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/mapper/topLuks
cryptsetup open /dev/mapper/topLuks bottomLuks
lsblk

Then you can make a filesystem and mount it:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/bottomLuks
mount /dev/mapper/bottomLuks ~/mnt/embeddedLuksTest

I've tested putting files on it and then unmounting & re-encrypting it, and the files are indeed still there upon decrypting and re-mounting.

Again, sorry if this is not news to anyone else, but I didn't realise this was possible before, and thought it was very cool when I found it out. Sharing in case other people didn't know and also find it cool :)

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[–] theit8514@lemmy.world 25 points 8 months ago (15 children)

You can, sure, but you probably shouldn't. Encrypting and decrypting consume additional cpu time, and you won't gain much in terms of security.

[–] authed@lemmy.ml 7 points 8 months ago (14 children)

not really if you have a hardware chip that does the encrypt/decrypting

[–] cbarrick@lemmy.world 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (10 children)

AES has been accelerated on all Intel CPUs since Broadwell, was common as far back as Sandy Bridge, and has been available since Westmere.

AMD has had AES acceleration since Bulldozer.

But the commenter is right that adding a second layer of encryption is useless in everything except very specific circumstances.

[–] krash@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What circumstances would that be? I can't see the use case doe this, but I'm open to see how and when that would be needed.

[–] cbarrick@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

There's a Wikipedia article on multiple encryption that talks about this, but the arguments are not that compelling to me.

The main thing is mostly about protecting your data from flawed implementations. Like, AES has not been broken theoretically, but a particular implementation may be broken. By stacking implementations from multiple vendors, you reduce the chance of being exposed by a vulnerability in one of them.

That's way overkill for most businesses. That's like nation state level paranoia.

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