Emmabuntus, Home encryption

[patrick72]

I am using Emmabuntus for quite a long time, and I am very happy with it. The reason why I'm using it is that it runs a) very stable and does not give me any troubles and b) it comes with so much useful stuff install so I don't have to bother with additional installs. I would like to say thank you to the developers to provide such a nice Linux distribution.

The reason why I write this post is, that I am unable to setup home encryption. I know, EB offers encrypted drives, but that is not what I am looking for. I share my computer with other people and it is crucial to all of our privacy that each users home directory is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access.

Debian 10 (Buster) does not support ecryptfs-utils anymore and if I try to use the deb file out of an older Debian ppa it won't work. Is there an easy work-around for a non-prof-user like me to setup home encryption on Emmabuntus? I tried almost everything posted on the internet, but I failed.

Thank you for any useful hint. Keep up the good work on EB!
Cheers
Patrick

[Patrick]

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for your return to Emmabuntüs DE 3.

For ecryptfs-utils, you have to take the versions here and install in this order:
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/libecryptfs1
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/ecryptfs-utils

See at the bottom of the page to download these two packages either in 32-bit or 64-bit version depending on the version you used on Emmabuntüs.

Then right-click on the downloaded files, and install with gDebi.

I launched ecryptfs-manager and it seems to work, see screenshot.

I'll let you see if it works well, I don't know these utilities.

Cheers

[patrick72]

Thank you Patrick for taking the time to test this and reply to me. I tried this as well, but it won't let me add new users with encryped homes. I tried to add a new user and selected "encrypt home", but I get an error message which I can't say where this comes from. It seems somehow too complicated to resolve. Anyhow, I appreciate it highly that you looked into it and tried to help. I continue to use Emmabuntus because it's cool. Thank you and Cheers.
Patrick

PS: see screenshot 1 & 2

[Patrick]

Yes, it does not work and there is this error message raised by users-admin :

(users-admin:1681): Liboobs-WARNING **: 16:58:00.858: There was an unknown error communicating with the backends: Message recipient disconnected from message bus without replying

I have tried this and it seems to work but I am not sure that everything works jointly then: https://wiki.debian.org/TransparentEncryptionForHomeFolder

I have make this on VirtualBox :

sudo modprobe ecryptfs

sudo ecryptfs-migrate-home -u <username>

username is the name of account you have created with users-admin  without crypted function, see screen capture.

The passphrase is the password of account to encrypt.

I don't know if everything is working properly afterwards. In any case, I managed to connect to the encrypted account.