[clug] how long to encrypt a 1T exernal disk using LUKS

[Daniel Pittman]

Paul Wayper <paulway at mabula.net> writes:
> On 06/29/2010 08:47 AM, jhock wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the prompt replies and suggestions. The encryption finally
>> finished last night. Thank goodness I only have to do that once.
>> Hopefully. ;--)
>
> You might also find that it needed a lot of randomness to do that.
>
> I'm just trying to figure out - did you mount the drive through cryptoloop and
> then format it, or is there some magical "encrypt the file system in place"
> thing that I haven't heard about?

luks, at least, takes the sensible approach of filling the drive with
pseudo-random data during the initial setup.  This is reasonable, because you
are otherwise going to encrypt huge chunks of null bytes, giving a wonderful
bit of known plain-text to any attacker.

        Daniel

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