New Backtrack 4 How-to – Bootable USB Thumb Drive with “Full” Disk Encryption

by kriggins on December 29, 2009

in Uncategorized

I have published my latest Backtrack 4 how-to.

Backtrack 4 - Bootable USB Thumb Drive with "Full" Disk Encryption

This is a step-by-step guide showing how to create a encrypted bootable Backtrack 4 USB thumb drive. I put quotes around full in the title because technically the whole disk isn't encrypted.

We use LVM and the native encryption routines included in Ubuntu 8.10 to encrypt all partitions except for a small boot partition that never contains any data.

This how-to is a departure from the persistent install method I have documented in the past. It also means we don't have to mess with Truecrypt or do the home directory shennanigins we were going through. I will be incorporating it into the main how-to in the near future.

As always, I am interested in your thoughts and feedback.

-Kevin

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1
Haley December 31, 2009 at 8:41 am

You shared a great solution here. Personally I’m a big fan of getting the final product – Sandisk’s encrypted USB drives do the job pretty well.

Reply

2
kriggins December 31, 2009 at 8:59 am

Thanks Haley. I agree that using an encrypted USB drive to start with is a good idea. However,
A) don’t have one to test with and
B) this allows anyone to use a commodity drive and still protect their data.

Kevin

Reply

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: