Its easy to bye-pass your system and access your content through recovery mode and so its necessary to Encrypt your files and folders. In Ubuntu, all your files and folders comes under "Home". So, if we encrypt that home folder, then our whole system becomes encrypted!
There are two options available for encrypting your files and folders.
1. Encrypting while Ubuntu installation itself.
2. Encrypting a particular folder and placing your files and folders there.
2. Encrypting a particular folder and placing your files and folders there.
If you are doing an "Fresh installation", then you can easily able to encrypt your home folder using the option "Require my password to login and to decrypt my home folder".
This option provides you with an extra layer of security. Your home folder
is where your personal files are stored.
is where your personal files are stored.
By selecting this option,
Ubuntu will automatically enable encryption on your home folder, meaning
that files and folders must be decrypted using your password before
they can be accessed.
Therefore if someone had physical access to your hard drive (for example, if
your computer was stolen and the hard drive removed), they would still not
be able to see your files without knowing your password.
your computer was stolen and the hard drive removed), they would still not
be able to see your files without knowing your password.
(Tip: If
you choose this option, be careful not to enable automatic login at a
later date. It will cause complications with your encrypted home folder,
and will potentially lock you out of important files.)
1. Whenever the installation get completed, you'll prompted for your login password by this encryption program.
2. After providing your password, you'll prompted to enter a "Pass-phrase" which helps you to encrypt and decrypt your home folder. (Please don't forget this Pass-phrase, because this will helpful for you if want to manually unlock it)
3. Or else, you just press the 'Enter key'
which Ubuntu will automatically generates a Pass-phrase for you. All
you need to do is, just copy and paste it anywhere and keep it safely!
Alternative method:
In case, if you failed to choose the above option, then no need to worry. You can go for this alternative method, where you are going to create one "Private folder" which is encrypted.
Inside this private folder, you can save your important documents, files, folders and all these will be encrypted (Hacker can't bye-pass your system and access this private folder and content which are inside it)
Just follow these steps!
1. Install the ecryptfs-utils software package using the following command.
$ sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
2.Setup your Private directory.
# ecryptfs-setup-private
3. Enter your account's password when prompted.4. Either choose a mount phrase or let ubuntu to generate.
5. Record both passphrases in a safe location. These are required if you ever
have to recover your data manually.
6. Logout and login back to mount your encrypted folder.
Now you are ready to use it. After the Private folder has been set up, any files or folders in it will automatically be encrypted.
Hope you enjoy this! Don't hesitate to ask!
