[Ubuntu Chicago] [ChicagoLinux] Ubuntu encrypted Private directories

[Christopher Allan Webber]

The real question isn't whether or not the machine is rooted, IMO, it's
how hard it is to get the password from running /etc/shadow against a
rainbow table.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table

And, I haven't done it before, but I understand that's pretty trivial.
At that point, you don't just "get access to the machine so you can
change the password", you get the *actual password*.  So if you can get
access to /etc/shadow, and can run the md5 hash against the rainbow
table, and indeed that gives you the user's *password*, then it would be
my understanding that if this is the *same* password used to encrypt the
private directory, then whammo, you have access to the private
directory.

Now of course, I don't have a whole ton of experience in security
workflows, but it seems to me like the way to break this system is:
 - Get *physical access* to the system (ie, steal someone's laptop)
 - Put in a boot disk to get access to the drive, and thus get access to
   /etc/shadow
 - Take the user's md5 hash, run it against the rainbow table
 - Get the user's password
 - Use the user's password to unlock the encrypted directory

And voila!  You have access to the encrypted directory.  And since the
only protection that encryption really gives is against someone stealing
data by getting local access to your machine, you might as well leave it
unencrypted anyway (or better, don't use the user's password & PAM for
the passphrase on the key, and have real encryption).

I could be missing something though.  Thoughts?


"Eddie Martinez" <eddiemartinez at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm not expert but it sounds to me like it would be easier to crack the md5
> hashed login password/passphrase than it would be to attack the ~/private
> dir...  The benefit comes from having a machine rooted and still having the
> private directory to be called 'secure' because those two would be
> independent, as you mentioned. The section about, "The pam_ecryptfs module
> captures the user's login password and uses that to unwrap their encrypted ~/
> Private mount passphrase" indicates that libpam/pam are used by the
> pam_ecryptfs module as part of the KDF function for generating the secret key
> for ~/Private.... This is actually more secure than rooting a machine or
> editing /etc/shadow because doing so changes the md5 hash of the password in /
> etc/passwd. If someone roots a machine and does 'passwd' and generates a new
> root password, they will be locking themselves out of the secret key which was
> used to encrypt ~/Private in the first place (asssuming no backup).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function
>
> At least this is my understanding, but I would still suggest SHA-512 instead
> of md5 for PAM, as well as grub passwd, seperate  /home, /swap, /var, etc., 
> encrypted using something like AES 256, non standard passphrases/user names,
> the whole nine yards.
>
> What I do find strange in the implementation of this, from the guides that
> I've seen is the need to do a syslink to tell ~/private where the actual files
> are located, as well as their handling of .ssh, but if anyone can talk about
> this, I'd be more than interested to hear about it on the list.
>
> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 5:56 PM, Jim Campbell <jwcampbell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Hi All,
>    
>     At yesterday's ChiGLUG meeting a couple of us finished up the Ubuntu 8.10
>     discussion by talking about the encrypted Private directories feature that
>     is new to Ubuntu in version 8.10.  Someone had brought up whether the
>     setup of the encrypted directories use PAM to mount the encrypted folder,
>     and I wasn't fully sure. 
>    
>     I did some checking today, and found some info that I thought I'd share:
>    
>     https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EncryptedPrivateDirectory
>     https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory
>    
>     From one of the pages, "The pam_ecryptfs module captures the user's login
>     password and uses that to unwrap their encrypted ~/Private mount
>     passphrase. It also executes mount.ecryptfs_private on login, and
>     umount.ecryptfs_private on logout."  Without knowing too much about it, it
>     seems to me that the pam_ecryptfs module would be different than the
>     standard pam or libpam module, but I'm not a 1337 hax0r or anything.  I
>     also know we've got some security experts in ChiGlug and Ubuntu-Chicago,
>     so I thought I'd just bring these up as a point of discussion. 
>    
>     I guess, to me, it seems like you're still toast if someone knows your
>     username and password (as per usual), but it prevents someone who gets
>     root access from being able to easily get at the data in the ~/Private
>     directory.  Seems like they could still hack on shadow passwords somehow
>     if they got access, and the setup isn't as strong as encrypting an entire
>     /home and /swap partition, but this just makes things one step more
>     difficult.  Any other thoughts on this?
>    
>     Jim
>    
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