52
Remote solution to decrypt disk at boot (jlai.lu)
submitted 11 months ago by Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] markomas@lemmy.world 16 points 10 months ago

Hi, Why not to do little bit diffrently?

  1. Server boots into unencrypted kernel with ssh server (it has just that ssh server)
  2. Then you connect remotely via ssh and provide password (unlock encrypted disks etc)
  3. Then system boots to encrypted environment which you unlocked at step 2
  4. profit

No second pc/raspberry is required

I have this done with luks on Debian: https://hamy.io/post/0009/how-to-install-luks-encrypted-ubuntu-18.04.x-server-and-enable-remote-unlocking/ I think you can adapt something similar to your freebsd

Quick google search found:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/encrypted-root-with-unencrypted-preboot-and-reboot-r.74378/

https://github.com/Sec42/freebsd-remote-crypto

[-] Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu 5 points 10 months ago

Shit, i totally missed this one, maybe not searching with good keywords... Thanks a lot, I've read fast for the moment so it doesn't seems to be fully encrypted but scenario in the forum and solution proposed can answer my needs (sorry for bad English ). Thanks !

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago

The key to a good search is to know what your are looking for.

If you know what you are looking for
I know how you feel brother.
At least we have the awesome members of the community showing us the other options!

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

Selfhosted

39877 readers
338 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz