September 16, 2009, 2:45 am
Last December we had looked at the Ubuntu 9.04 home encryption performance after this feature appeared in a development snapshot as an alternative to those looking for security some of their data but are not looking for completely encrypting the hard drive due to the performance impact or other reasons. The home encryption feature ended up being disabled in Ubuntu 9.04 unless a special boot parameter was used, but it has now reappeared in Ubuntu 9.10.
The home encryption support offered in Ubuntu 9.10 comes with many bug fixes and usability issues compared to what was offered in Ubuntu 9.04. The change-log that details all of the work that has went into the eCryptfs package since Ubuntu 9.04 can be found on Launchpad.net. Additionally, this feature now provides AppArmor rules, enabled shell scripts for localization/translations, and now the SWAP partition is encrypted if using the home directory encryption feature. In Ubuntu 9.04 the SWAP partition was never encrypted if using the home encryption feature, which lowered the level of security that was offered and its benefits. With Ubuntu 9.10 the EXT4 file-system is being used by default, which should lead to difference performance figures from our earlier test runs. As a result we have carried out a new round of Ubuntu home directory encryption testing under an Ubuntu 9.10 development snapshot. This feature is exposed both through Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer as well as through Ubuntu’s alternate install CD…
