I. Introduction Motivation
Today security is one of the key aspects in our daily life - sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. Security has many aspects and one of them is computer security or security of your or your business’ computer data.

In this tutorial I will show how to encrypt a whole disk drive using (X)Ubuntu Feisty, dm-crypt, and LUKS.

I have gathered this information from various sources and put it all together. Those are:

- http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-disk-encryption-with-dm-crypt-luks-and-debian
- https://systemausfall.org/wikis/howto/CryptoPartitionHowTo
- amayera in the #ubuntu channel on irc.freenode.org

Warning

This tutorial will destroy any data on the harddisk that you use. It is adviced to be very careful which harddisk you enter. Do not use it to encrypt your harddisk where you have Linux installed. The primary aim is to encrypt an additional harddisk that is used for data storage.

Some legal considerations

There are other encryption methods available. Foremost probably to mention is true-crypt which offers a greater extend of plausible deniability by having two levels of encryption. The idea behind that is, that if someone sees that you have a large drive/partition with only jitter on it that sort of looks like deleted data this person may come to the conclusion that it is an encrypted partition/drive. In this case you may be forced (by a judge or some bad-guys) to reveal the access to that encrypted partition/drive. So instead of giving access to the really high confidential data you only give access to less confidential data. This inspector can’t tell for sure if that is truly all information on that disk.

So far to that idea. I however believe, that if you have a 2-level encryption the other party will never believe that you have given out all the keywords for all 2nd level encrypted files. While the idea is good I just think you won’t be trusted that you have given all information and this renders it all useless again…

However for me plausible deniability is not that important. Living in Europe in a country that has ratified the European Charter of Human Rights I have basic freedoms granted to me among the right to remain silent without facing any negative consequence (well, this only plays a role in criminal proceedings).

This means a court ordering me to give out the password to activate the encrypted drive has no negative consequences for me. If it does anyway I can appeal to the European Court of Human Right, residing in Strasbourg, and very likely it will consider such an act as breach of the Charter and convict the according state.

While in criminal proceedings it must be proved that you as an individual did commit a wrongful act it is different in civil law proceedings. In some countries you can be held liable for the information that passes through your internet account without you knowing that this happens and without you doing anything. In that case no evidence on your harddisk will be needed (well, if there is evidence found, it’s even better…) and hence an encrypted drive will not protect you in this matter.

Due to this I concentrate myself on encryption provided by dm-crypt and LUKS which does not offer such advanced plausible deniability with multi-levels of encrypted data.

* Notice: As I am a graduate law student here in Switzerland I can mostly speak for legal considerations concerning Switzerland. In other countries (in Europe) it may be a bit different but the basic principles and their effects for the guaranteed freedom of people in contracting states remain the same. Also the terms I used very likely aren’t the correct legal terms in English however they should be looked at as a mean to get the idea accross of why I think that multi-level encryption has not a big impact here in Europe. The above statements are in no way to be considered as legal practice as each case is different.

II. Install necessary software

As stated above, I use Xubuntu Feisty for this. This may also work on older *buntu releases and very likely also other debian-based distributions.

Install the necessary software:

Source  and More : http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_dm_crypt_luks 

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