I'm learning how to use eCryptfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ECryptfs
I get things as below from the link:
This is used to derive the actual file encryption master key. Thus, you should not enter a custom one unless you know what you are doing - instead press Enter to let it auto-generate a secure random one. It will be encrypted using the login passphrase and stored in this encrypted form in ~/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase. Later it will automatically be decrypted ("unwrapped") again in RAM when needed, so you never have to enter it manually. Make sure this file does not get lost, otherwise you can never access your encrypted folder again!
So I did a simple test:
ecryptfs-setup-private
mkdir -p ~/test
mount -t ecryptfs ~/test ~/test
cd ~/test && vim data
umount -t ecryptfs ~/test
For now, I did get an encrypted file, which means that ~/test/data
was unreadable.
Of course, if I mount it again, I can read it.
Now, I delete ~/.ecryptfs: rm -rf ~/.ecryptfs
.
Then I try to mount it: mount -t ecryptfs ~/test ~/test
To my surprise, I can still mount it and read the ~/test/data
.
Now I'm confused. I thought I could move ~/.encryptfs
into some USB to keep my secret data secure. But it doesn't seem to work because I can still mount it even if I delete ~/.encryptfs
. Am I doing something wrong?
ecryptfs-setup-private
which uses a wrapped passphrase. Your test does not create a wrapped passphrase, and so the original passphrase is sufficient to decrypt the files.exryptfs-setup-private
at the beginning. Maybe I do it in a wrong way?ecryptfs-setup-private
when doing your test.