How safe is encrypted disks? (data integrity)

[Fabian Keil]

Erik Norgaard <norgaard at locolomo.org> wrote:

> I have been thinking to make /home on my laptop encrypted - seems like a 
> good idea if it gets stolen. Now, how safe is this? Not in terms of the 
> strength of the encryption algorithm, but in terms of integrity.

I have no insight on the code, but as nobody else answered,
my response may be better than nothing.
 
> What happens in case of power failure, the battery runs out or system 
> crashes for whatever reason?

I have my home slice encrypted with GELI for several month now
and so far I didn't notice any effects on the data integrity.

I experienced several system crashes and one or two power failures
do to empty battery but I didn't lose any data already saved
on the disk (that I know of).

The only inconvenience is that the system boots to single-user
mode if the home slice isn't clean and I then have to fsck it
manually.

At that point the password for the key is already entered,
so I'm not sure why the slice can't be fscked automatically.
It could be the .eli extension, but I didn't investigate this
any further.

Fabian
-- 
http://www.fabiankeil.de/
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