This post was originally published on June 15, 2014. The original can be found here. Note that there are other direct, compatible, alternatives and proper successors to TrueCrypt these days, including VeraCrypt. This post is simply about a different option available to Linux users.
With the recent questions surrounding the security of TrueCrypt there has been a big push to move away from that program and switch to alternatives. One such alternative, on Linux anyway, is the Linux Unified Key Setup (or LUKS) which allows you to encrypt disk volumes. This guide will show you how to create encrypted file volumes, just like you could using TrueCrypt.
The Differences
There are a number of major differences between TrueCrypt and LUKS that you may want to be aware of:
- TrueCrypt supported the concept of hidden volumes, LUKS does not.
- TrueCrypt allowed you to encrypt a volume in-place, without losing data, LUKS does not.
- TrueCrypt supports cipher cascades where the data is encrypted using multiple different algorithms just in case one of them is broken at some point in the future. As I understand it this is being talked about for the LUKS 2.0 spec but is currently not a feature.
If you are familiar with the terminology in TrueCrypt you can think of LUKS as offering both full disk encryption and standard file containers.
How to create an encrypted LUKS file container
The following steps borrow heavily from a previous post so you should go read that if you want more details on some of the commands below. Also note that while LUKS offers a lot of options in terms of cipher/digest/key size/etc, this guide will try to keep it simple and just use the defaults.
Step 1: Create a file to house your encrypted volume
The easiest way is to run the following commands which will create the file and then fill it with random noise:
# fallocate -l <size> <file to create> # dd if=/dev/urandom of=<file to create> bs=1M count=<size>
For example let’s say you wanted a 500MiB file container called MySecrets.img, just run this command:
# fallocate -l 500M MySecrets.img # dd if=/dev/urandom of=MySecrets.img bs=1M count=500
Here is a handy script that you can use to slightly automate this process:
#!/bin/bash
NUM_ARGS=$#
if [ $NUM_ARGS -ne 2 ] ; then
echo Wrong number of arguments.
echo Usage: [size in MiB] [file to create]
else
SIZE=$1
FILE=$2
echo Creating $FILE with a size of ${SIZE}MB
# create file
fallocate -l ${SIZE}M $FILE
#randomize file contents
dd if=/dev/urandom of=$FILE bs=1M count=$SIZE
fi
Just save the above script to a file, say “create-randomized-file-volume.sh”, mark it as executable and run it like this:
# ./create-randomized-file-volume.sh 500 MySecrets.img
Step 2: Format the file using LUKS + ext4
There are ways to do this in the terminal but for the purpose of this guide I’ll be showing how to do it all within gnome-disk-utility. From the menu in Disks, select Disks -> Attach Disk Image and browse to your newly created file (i.e. MySecrets.img).
Be sure to uncheck “Set up read-only loop device”. If you leave this checked you won’t be able to format or write anything to the volume. Select the file and click Attach.
This will attach the file, as if it were a real hard drive, to your computer:
Next we need to format the volume. Press the little button with two gears right below the attached volume and click Format. Make sure you do this for the correct ‘drive’ so that you don’t accidentally format your real hard drive!
From this popup you can select the filesystem type and even name the drive. In the image above the settings will format the drive to LUKS and then create an ext4 filesystem within the encrypted LUKS one. Click Format, confirm the action and you’re done. Disks will format the file and even auto-mount it for you. You can now copy files to your mounted virtual drive. When you’re done simply eject the drive like normal or (with the LUKS partition highlighted) press the lock button in Disks. To use that same volume again in the future just re-attach the disk image using the steps above, enter your password to unlock the encrypted partition and you’re all set.
But I don’t even trust TrueCrypt enough to unlock my already encrypted files!
If you’re just using TrueCrypt to open an existing file container so that you can copy your files out of there and into your newly created LUKS container I think you’ll be OK. That said there is a way for you to still use your existing TrueCrypt file containers without actually using the TrueCrypt application.
First install an application called tc-play. This program works with the TrueCrypt format but doesn’t share any of its code. To install it simply run:
# sudo apt-get install tcplay
Next we need to mount your existing TrueCrypt file container. For the sake of this example we’ll assume your file container is called TOPSECRET.tc.
We need to use a loop device but before doing that we need to first find a free one. Running the following command
# sudo losetup -f
should return the first free loop device. For example it may print out
/dev/loop0
Next you want to associate the loop device with your TrueCrypt file container. You can do this by running the following command (sub in your loop device if it differs from mine):
# sudo losetup /dev/loop0 TOPSECRET.tc
Now that our loop device is associated we need to actually unlock the TrueCrypt container:
# sudo tcplay -m TOPSECRET.tc -d /dev/loop0
Finally we need to mount the unlocked TrueCrypt container to a directory so we can actually use it. Let’s say you wanted to mount the TrueCrypt container to a folder in the current directory called SecretStuff:
# sudo mount -o nosuid,uid=1000,gid=100 /dev/mapper/TOPSECRET.tc SecretStuff/
Note that you should swap your own uid and gid in the above command if they aren’t 1000 and 100 respectively. You should now be able to view your TrueCrypt files in your SecretStuff directory. For completeness sake here is how you unmount and re-lock the same TrueCrypt file container when you are done:
# sudo umount SecretStuff/ # sudo dmsetup remove TOPSECRET.tc # sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
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