I always thought, that all user data (/home/) are decently safe against physical access, as long as my user and root password is strong enough.
If I just plug in the hard drive, nobody except the Super User has access to the data on it.
Well, the guys on the other community (Link) have shown me how wrong I’ve been.
All of my devices are securely encrypted. Well, all of them, except the most important one: my server, where all pictures, documents and other private stuff is stored.
Now, I’m afraid as hell that this will go wrong in the future.
Imagine a vengeful ex girlfriend, a police raid, whatever.
It’s just dumb from my side to secure everything except the one thing that would need it the most.
I’ve already done my homework, and encryption doesn’t seem like a highly important topic in the selfhosting community, or on many servers else.
At least that’s what I’ve got the feeling.
The most common argument I hear is “nobody will get physical access anyway, so I don’t care”.
Threat model and security measures
My threat model: not high. I don’t do any illegal stuff and don’t have any enemies. Still, I want everything at least somewhat secure.
If it only serves the purpose to annoy the intruder it’s already enough.
The only thing that has online access is my Nextcloud (AIO from Docker), and that is already well secured against hacking attacks (password, 2FA, brute force protection, etc.).
It’s also the only thing that is worth securing in my eyes.
Options for encryption
LUKS2 full disk
I would need to factory reset the whole server for that, which would be … highly inconvenient for me. It took me quite a long time to get everything working, and I don’t wanna loose my configuration.
Also, how should I access the device when I don’t see anything?
Is there a workaround or something when I want to reboot without a monitor and keyboard?
Only encrypt the home folder
Same problem as with FDE
Nextcloud server side encryption
That one isn’t recommended from what I’ve read. It causes compatibility issues and an extreme hit on performance according to forums. Is this still correct?
Cryptomator (?)
Encrypting and decrypting with every up- and download sounds quite annoying. Wouldn’t be my prefered method tbh.
What is your opinion on that topic? What would you recommend me?
Please remember, that I’m not that experienced as much, so please be patient with me 😬
If that’s not possible or desirable for whatever reason like not having other drives to backup the data to, there’s some more options: if it’s ext4 there’s fscrypt which you can then just move the files to the encrypted folder, otherwise there’s gocryptfs. In both cases you only need enough free space for a temporary copy of the biggest file.
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You can use cryptsetup-reencrypt to encrypt an existing disk in place with LUKS. Then you just have to modify the initramfs/bootloader/fstab to point to the new configuration. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Device_encryption#Encrypt_an_existing_unencrypted_file_system
If that’s not possible or desirable for whatever reason like not having other drives to backup the data to, there’s some more options: if it’s ext4 there’s fscrypt which you can then just move the files to the encrypted folder, otherwise there’s gocryptfs. In both cases you only need enough free space for a temporary copy of the biggest file.