Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

This is what I set up for backups recently using a cheap USB-enclosure which can house 2 SATA disks and shows them as 2 USB mass-storage devices to my system (using only one USB cable). Without any further introduction, here goes the HOWTO:

First, create one big partition on each of the two disks (/dev/sdc and /dev/sdd in my case) of the exact same size. The cfdisk details are omitted here.

  $ cfdisk /dev/sdc
  $ cfdisk /dev/sdd

Then, create a new RAID array using the mdadm utility:

  $ mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

The array is named md0, consists of the two devices (--raid-devices=2) /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdd1, and it's a RAID-1 array, i.e. data is simply mirrored on both disks so if one of them fails you don't lose data (--level=1). After this has been done the array will be synchronized so that both disks contain the same data (this process will take a long time). You can watch the current status via:

  $ cat /proc/mdstat
  Personalities : [raid1]
  md0 : active raid1 sdd1[1] sdc1[0]
        1465135869 blocks super 1.1 [2/2] [UU]
        [>....................]  resync =  0.0% (70016/1465135869) finish=2440.6min speed=10002K/sec
  unused devices: 

Some more info is also available from mdadm:

  $ mdadm --detail --scan
  ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=1.01 name=foobar:0 UUID=1234578:1234578:1234578:1234578

  $ mdadm --detail /dev/md0
  /dev/md0:
          Version : 1.01
    Creation Time : Sat Feb  6 23:58:51 2010
       Raid Level : raid1
       Array Size : 1465135869 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB)
    Used Dev Size : 1465135869 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB)
     Raid Devices : 2
    Total Devices : 2
      Persistence : Superblock is persistent
      Update Time : Sun Feb  7 00:03:21 2010
            State : active, resyncing
   Active Devices : 2
  Working Devices : 2
   Failed Devices : 0
    Spare Devices : 0
   Rebuild Status : 0% complete
             Name : foobar:0  (local to host foobar)
             UUID : 1234578:1234578:1234578:1234578
           Events : 1
      Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
         0       8       33        0      active sync   /dev/sdc1
         1       8       49        1      active sync   /dev/sdd1

Next, you'll want to create a big partition on the RAID device (cfdisk details omitted)...

  $ cfdisk /dev/md0

...and then encrypt all the (future) data on the device using dm-crypt+LUKS and cryptsetup:

  $ cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/md0p1
  Enter your desired pasphrase here (twice)
  $ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0p1 myraid

After opening the encrypted container with cryptsetup luksOpen you can create a filesystem on it (ext3 in my case):

  $ mkfs.ext3 -j -m 0 /dev/mapper/myraid

That's about it. In future you can access the RAID data by using the steps below.

Starting the RAID and mouting the drive:

  $ mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
  $ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0p1 myraid
  $ mount -t ext3 /dev/mapper/myraid /mnt

Shutting down the RAID:

  $ umount /mnt
  $ cryptsetup luksClose myraid
  $ mdadm --stop /dev/md0

That's all. Performance is shitty due to all the data being shoved out over one USB cable (and USB itself being too slow for these amounts of data), but I don't care too much about that as this setup is meant for backups, not performance-critical stuff.

Update 04/2011: Thanks to Bohdan Zograf there's a Belorussian translation of this article now!

According to this (German) spiegel.de article, thieves have stolen a hard drive from the recording studio of the quite popular German band Rosenstolz.

Among the contents of the drive are unreleased songs from the past six years and two songs which should be released on a new single in a few weeks. Apparently those two songs on the drive were the only instance they had, off-site backups only contained older "beta" versions of the songs. As the band is touring at the moment (i.e. no time for re-recording the songs), it's unclear whether the single can be released in time.

Lessons learned:

• Backups, backups, backups!
• Disk-encryption is not only for paranoid computer geeks, but also for normal people like you and me[1]. Really! If that hard drive would have been encrypted they would still suffer because of the lack of good backups, but at least their unreleased songs wouldn't have fallen in the hands of the thieves. I bet those songs will soon appear in P2P networks around the globe[2].

(via Fefe)

[1] Well, I am a paranoid computer geek, and I'm probably not a normal person, but you get the point ;-)
[2] Oh, and if the thieves are stupid enough they will get caught while uploading the files ;-)

Yet another thing that has been on my TODO list for quite a while: encrypted USB thumb drives and/or encrypted external USB hard drives.

I have finally tried this over the weekend using loop-AES. This is very useful for securing your USB thumb drive contents in case you lose it or it gets stolen. Also, I use an external USB hard drive for backups (previously unencrypted). This is encryped now, too.

Here's a quick HOWTO:

1. Get the loop-AES kernel patches, apply them, enable "AES encrypted loop device support" in "Device Drivers -> Block Devices -> Loopback device support", and recompile the kernel.
   I also enabled "loop encryption key scrubbing support" as it seems to promise higher security (can anybody confirm that?).
   If you're using the Debian kernel packages, apt-get install loop-aes-2.6-686 (or a similar package) should suffice.
2. Get a loop-aes enabled losetup, mount etc.:
   apt-get install loop-aes-utils
3. Securely delete the target partition: shred -n 1 -v /dev/sda3.
   Use -n 25 or higher if you want more security and have a few days time to wait for the thing to finish...
4. Setup the loopback device: losetup -e aes256 -C 3 -S 'seed' /dev/loop0 /dev/sda3.
   Notes:
   • I used AES-256 as cipher, but others are possible.
   • The -C 3 means "run hashed password through 3000 iterations of AES-256 before using it for loop encryption. This consumes lots of CPU cycles at loop setup/mount time but not thereafter." (see losetup(8)). This is supposed to be more secure.
   • Using -S 'seed' (replace "seed" with a secret string like "g7sN4" or something) should make brute force attacks a bit harder. Don't forget the seed!
   • You'll be asked for a passphrase > 20 characters. Choose a good one. Don't forget it!
5. Create the filesystem (I used ext3): mke2fs -j /dev/loop0
6. Detach the loopback device: losetup -d /dev/loop0
7. Add this to /etc/fstab:
   /dev/sda3 /mnt/crypted_sda3 ext3 noauto,loop=/dev/loop0,encryption=AES256,itercountk=3 0 0
8. Mount the (now encrypted) partition by supplying the seed and entering the chosen password: mount -o pseed=seed /mnt/crypted_sda3
9. Done. You can now copy stuff to /mnt/crypted_sda3 which will be encrypted automatically.

For a more detailed guide read the Encrypted-Root-Filesystem-HOWTO. A performance comparison of different ciphers is available, but in general I didn't notice too much of a slow-down because of the encryption...