Hi! I want to try out fedora workstation in the near future (once 39 is out) and was wondering if systemd-homed is ready for everyday use yet.
I’m a bit paranoid and really need my private data encrypted. However, I don’t think that full disk encryption is practical for my daily use. Therefore I was really looking forward to the encryption possibilities of systemd-homed.
However, after reading up on it, I was a bit discouraged. AFAIK, there’s no option to setup systemd-homed at installation (of fedora). I was an Arch then Manjaro, then Endeavour user for years but don’t have the time/patience anymore to configure major parrts of my system anymore. Also, the documentation doesn’t seem too noob-friendly to me, which also plays into the time/patience argument.
Is it ready? Can anyone seriously recommend it for a lazy ex-Arch user who doesn’t want to break another linux installation?
Thank you in advance. :)
TPM is only kinda related to FDE, in that it can be used to unlock a LUKS encrypted volume. FDE doesn’t require a TPM.
I also wouldn’t recommend automatically unlocking your root partition on boot using the TPM as this allows access to your data if the device is stolen, which, for an average user, defeats the main purpose of FDE.
How so? The data is still encrypted on the drive after boot, so unless your machine also automatically logs you in, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.
At that point you relying on the fact that nothing running in your machine at boot can be compromised - after all, everything running on your machine has access to your unencrypted data.
If you don’t automatically unlock using the TPM, an attacker only has access to encrypted data.
Very true, which is why it’s important to run as few services and have a locked down firewall. Maintaining a minimal attack surface is everything.
If the attack involves stealing the machine it has been demonstrated that you can ice the ram and swap it into another machine without data loss, recover the keys, and access the drive.
If we’re talking apt adversaries it’s also possible to just build a ram sniffer
While true, I think most people’s concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.
If you’re doing things that mean you’re going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you’re presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.
Those people need to learn how to fend of these attacks somewhere, too.
I guess my point was that if you’re going to use FDE and unlock the disk without a password, don’t bother hardening against attacks that involve stealing the whole machine.
Agreed that this is almost fiction level paranoia.