[Bug 886483] Re: Twofish LUKS Support in Alternate Installer

[Brian Knoll]

Hi Steve,

In Lucid and prior versions of Ubuntu, when using the Alternate
installer the user would be presented with three choices when installing
to a LUKS partition: AES, Blowfish, Serpent or Twofish.  Of course,
additional options were also presented, but these four basic ciphers
were always available.

Some time around either Maverick or Natty, the option for Twofish was
removed, and now it is only possible to install onto AES, Blowfish, or
Serpent, but not Twofish.  Note that if one installs Lucid using Twofish
partitions, then upgrades through the versions all the way up to Oneiric
(as I have done on the machine in this report), the Twofish partitions
will work fine.  There is no problem continuing to use them in the newer
versions of Ubuntu once they are installed, it is just that the newer
versions of Ubuntu do not offer the option of Twofish any more in the
Alternate installer.

Thanks for looking into this.  Let me know if there is anything I can do
to help.

Brian

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/886483

Title:
  Twofish LUKS Support in Alternate Installer

Status in “cryptsetup” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  In the Ubuntu Alternate installer, the option for using Twofish
  appears to have been removed around the Maverick or, possibly, Natty
  time frame.  The option to install using LUKS onto Twofish partitions
  was present in Lucid, but some time around Maverick or Natty it was
  removed and now this option is no longer available when using the
  alternate installer to install a LUKS partition.

  It would be preferable to have this option back, as Twofish is a very
  viable cipher which has very high strength, yet is reasonably fast.
  It is, of course, possible to create Twofish partitions post-install,
  but having this feature during the install itself is very useful,
  especially for the root partition.  Further, this feature existed in
  Ubuntu previously.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: cryptsetup 2:1.1.3-4ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: openafs
  ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Sat Nov  5 05:46:11 2011
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: cryptsetup
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-11-01 (3 days ago)
  crypttab:
   sda2_crypt UUID=2fcde4e4-1711-42fe-8612-bb532b6c4bc6 none luks
   sda3_crypt /dev/sda3 /dev/urandom cipher=twofish-cbc-essiv:sha256,size=256,swap

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