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Remote solution to decrypt disk at boot (jlai.lu)
submitted 11 months ago by Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi there ! I have a little box at home, hosting some little services for personal use under freebsd with a full disk encryption (geli). I'm never at home and long power outage often occurs so I always need to come back home to type my passphrase to decrypt the disk.

I was searching this week a solution to do it remotely and found the "poor-guy-kvm" solutions turning a Raspberry like board (beaglebone black in my case) in a hid keyboard. It works fine once the computer has booted but once reboot when the passphrase is asked before it loads the loader menu, nothing. When I plug an ordinary USB keyboard I can type my passphrase so USB module is loaded.

Am I missing something ? Am I trying something impossible ?

(I could've asked on freebsd forum but... Have to suscribe, presentation, etc... Long journey)

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[-] rentar42@kbin.social 7 points 11 months ago

I'm using encrypted ZFS as the root partition on my server and I've (mostly) followed the instructions in point #15 from here: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Debian/Debian%20Bookworm%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html

This starts dropbear as an SSH server that only has a single task: when someone logs in to it they get asked for the decryption key of the root partition.

I suspect that this could be adopted to whatever encryption mechanism you use.

I didn't follow it exactly, because I didn't want the "real" SSH host keys of the host to be accessible unencrypted in the initrd, so the "locked host" has a different SSH host key than when it is fully booted, which is preferred for me.

[-] Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu 3 points 11 months ago

I've read that freebsd 14 proposed zfs native encryption, so it could worked. Maybe it's time to upgrade, I will see. Thanks !

this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
52 points (100.0% liked)

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