Re: Protection of boot sector and embedded area

[James Courtier-Dutton]

2009/9/27 Michal Suchanek <address@hidden>:
>
> Obviously your encryption solution does not encrypt the linux volume
> which you boot using the USB stick so it has no reason to be loaded
> when loading Linux, it can only cause harm by trying to decrypt what
> is not encrypted.
You make a assumption that the encryption program would cause harm. It does not.
One specifies which partitions to encrypt/decrypt and it leaves the rest alone.

>
> Also as Grub can access the disk drives by various means (BIOS, PCI
> device driver, ...) the encryption software would have to hijack all
> these access paths transparently which I can't imagine happening.
>
One would obviously need grub to only use BIOS calls and no direct PCI
device access for it to work together with the whole disc encryption
program in pre-boot stages. Alternatively, one would have to add
encryption support into grub itself that is not a good idea.
I think that maybe being able to install grub into it's own small
partition instead of the embedded area would be all I would need.

Kind Regards

James