[Bug 1857398] Re: ubiquity should support encryption by default with zfsroot, with users able to opt in to running change-key after install

[Richard Laager]

This is an interesting approach. I figured the installer should prompt
for encryption, and it probably still should, but if the performance
impact is minimal, this does have the nice property of allowing for
enabling encryption post-install.

It might be worthwhile (after merging the SIMD fixes) to benchmark
aes256-ccm (the default) vs encryption=aes-256-gcm. I think GCM seems to
be preferred, security wise, in various places (though I don't
immediately have references) and may be faster. There's also an upstream
PR in progress that significantly improves AES-GCM:
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/9749

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1857398

Title:
  ubiquity should support encryption by default with zfsroot, with users
  able to opt in to running change-key after install

Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in zfs-linux package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  zfs supports built-in encryption support, but the decision of whether
  a pool is encrypted or not must be made at pool creation time; it is
  possible to add encrypted datasets on top of an unencrypted pool but
  it is not possible to do an online change of a dataset (or a whole
  pool) to toggle encryption.

  We should therefore always install with encryption enabled on zfs
  systems, with a non-secret key by default, and allow the user to use
  'zfs change-key -o keylocation=prompt' after install to take ownership
  of the encryption and upgrade the security.

  This is also the simplest way to allow users to avoid having to choose
  between the security of full-disk encryption, and the advanced
  filesystem features of zfs since it requires no additional UX work in
  ubiquity.

  We should make sure that
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1857040 is fixed
  first in the kernel so that enabling zfs encryption does not impose an
  unreasonable performance penalty.

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