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Date:      Fri, 29 Jul 2005 12:36:55 +0200
From:      Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Benjamin Lutz <benlutz@datacomm.ch>
Cc:        current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: GELI - disk encryption GEOM class committed.
Message-ID:  <20050729103655.GG609@darkness.comp.waw.pl>
In-Reply-To: <42E981B9.5060500@datacomm.ch>
References:  <20050728205413.GB762@darkness.comp.waw.pl> <42E95E08.80006@datacomm.ch> <42E981B9.5060500@datacomm.ch>

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On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 03:09:13AM +0200, Benjamin Lutz wrote:
+> > GELI is different than GBDE. It offers different features, but it also
+> > use different scheme for doing crypto work.
+>=20
+>=20
+> I tried to find out what exactly the differences are. Please correct me
+> where I'm wrong:
+>=20
+> Encryption Strength:
+>   GELI - Supports AES, Blowfish, 3DES for data encryption, with a
+>          different key per sector. Access key is PKCS #5 protected.
+>          (What does this mean regarding a brute force attack?)

No. The encryption key is the same. Every data block is encrypted using
choosen encryption algorithm in CBC mode and with per-block unique IVs.

PKCS#5v2 basically takes your passphrase and makes huge number of
HMAC/SHA512 rounds with it. The result is used as a key.
When brute forcing, you need to take a passphrase, do the same HMAC/SHA512
work and result use as a key to try.

It works really great as passphrase protection. On my laptop it takes
about 1 second to make 2^16 HMAC/SHA512 operations.

+> Speed:
+>   GBDE - Runs in software.
+>   GELI - Support for crypto(9) hardware. Blowfish is faster than AES.

This was one of the main GELI goals, that's why simple sector-to-sector
encryption is used, so geli doesn't add disk overhead.

+> Booting from Encrypted Root:
+>   GELI - Works. How'd one load the kernel from an encrypted root though?

Kernel has to be loaded from a USB Pen-Drive or a CD-ROM.
You need to put /boot/ directory in there. GELI will ask for the passphrase
before root file system is mounted. After that you can remove
Pen-Drive/CD-ROM.

+> The GBDE manpage warns that the on-disk format might be changed in the
+> future. What about GELI? It'd be unpleasant to upgrade the OS and then
+> find out that the encrypted volume is no longer accessible.

It will be changed only in case of security flaw.

+> How much throughput can one expect in practice, say, compared to the
+> numbers in "openssl speed"?

Depends on your disk speed, but you should just try it.

--=20
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheel.pl
pjd@FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!

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