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Disk Encryption & Virtual Servers

Posted on June 1, 2014

Before I start I just want to make the following quite clear :

  1. Yes, this is ridiculous
  2. Yes, I still want to do it anyway
  3. No, the data i’m storing might not need this level of encryption
  4. Yes, I have foil hats if anybody wants one.

So what do I want to do ? Well basicly I want to encrypt the Hard disk of my VPS with LUKS and decrypt on boot (like so : http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5017/ssh-to-decrypt-encrypted-lvm-during-headless-server-boot )

I’m not entirely sure how i’d go about this with my VPS. The problematic part is the creation of the partition that will hold the Encrypted data. I need it to be my rootfs.

I’ve come up with several vague solutions, but i haven’t the slightest idea if they’ll really work :

  1. Create an encrypted “File” that contains the rootFS and setup initrd to decrypt that file and mount it as / .

  2. run fdisk on the system and resize the disk , then move everything to the new encrypted partition apart from the /boot directory. Have no idea if this can actually work.

  3. Create an image with VirtualBox of a encrypted system, upload this to my VPS, load it into the ram and load dd into the ram, then overwrite the existing disk (this is very unlikely to work, i have no real clue).

Has anyone tried this before ? anyone have a different approach ?

Cheers :)

-jman6495



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Unfortunately, we do not support booting from custom kernels so you can’t modify <code>initrd</code>. We also do not support partitioning currently so #2 won’t work (though that’s in the works). <br>I’m not sure about #3, you can give it a shot but I doubt it’ll work. <br>Take a look at <a href=“https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-use-dm-crypt-to-create-an-encrypted-volume-on-an-ubuntu-vps”>How To Use DM-Crypt to Create an Encrypted Volume on an Ubuntu VPS</a>.

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