dm-crypt ========= Device-Mapper's "crypt" target provides transparent encryption of block devices using the kernel crypto API. Parameters: <cipher> <key> <iv_offset> <device path> <offset> <cipher> Encryption cipher and an optional IV generation mode. (In format cipher[:keycount]-chainmode-ivopts:ivmode). Examples: des aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 twofish-ecb /proc/crypto contains supported crypto modes <key> Key used for encryption. It is encoded as a hexadecimal number. You can only use key sizes that are valid for the selected cipher. <keycount> Multi-key compatibility mode. You can define <keycount> keys and then sectors are encrypted according to their offsets (sector 0 uses key0; sector 1 uses key1 etc.). <keycount> must be a power of two. <iv_offset> The IV offset is a sector count that is added to the sector number before creating the IV. <device path> 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 <major>:<minor>. <offset> Starting sector within the device where the encrypted data begins. 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 ]]