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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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[-] jellyfish@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago

You gave some options

  • TPM 2 based disk encryption. This is basically what bitlocker does, but it isn't great. It uses an encryption key stored on your TPM chip, that shouldn't ever be accessible to be exported. This means the disk should only be decryptable in the machine it's in. That in conjunction with secure boot can give you some guarantees that the only way to access data is through the the computer itself (no pulling the disk first). The issue is there are many potential vulnerabilities that could subvert this, logoFAIL being the most recent.

  • You could setup a proper KVM. The two gotos are PiKVM and TinyPilot. Jeff Geerling did a good video on these. It'll cost a few 100 bucks but can definitely be worth it. You might consider a motherboard with a builtin KVM in your next build too.

  • Setup NBDE (Network Bound Disk Encryption). This is pretty new, but what I'm planning to move to. Redhat has an implementation with Tang & Clevis (server and clients). You might be able to eventually use Clevis with other alternative backend too.

[-] Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks for your answer ! Someone already mention TPM, I will check about that when I will have free time. Already try pikvm and tinypilot with no success unfortunately.. Didn't know NBSDE, will take a look too !

this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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