Hello,

Following loosely this document:
http://www.sdc.org/~leila/usb-dongle/readme.html
I have set up (or tried) to encrypt my swap partition (/dev/hda2).
Here is what I did:
* create /usr/local/sbin/crypto-swap (modified!)
#!/bin/sh
# Run this script somewhere in your startup scripts _after_
# random number generator has been initialized and /usr has
# been mounted. (md5sum, uuencode, tail and head programs usually
# reside in /usr/bin/)                  
+# insert cypher module into kernel
+       modprobe aes
                
# encrypted swap partition
SWAPDEVICE=/dev/hda2

# loop device name
LOOPDEV=/dev/loop6

MD=`dd if=${SWAPDEVICE} bs=4k count=10 2>/dev/null | md5sum`
for X in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 ; do        
   dd if=/dev/zero of=${SWAPDEVICE} bs=4k count=10 \ 
   conv=notrunc 2>/dev/null
   sync
done
UR=`dd if=/dev/urandom bs=18 count=1 2>/dev/null \                      
    |uuencode -m - | head -n 2 | tail-n 1`
+echo ${MD}${UR} | losetup -p 0 -e aes -k 256 ${LOOPDEV}${SWAPDEVICE}   -echo 
${MD}${UR} | losetup -p 0-e aes-256-cbc${LOOPDEV} ${SWAPDEVICE} 
MD=
UR=
dd if=/dev/zero of=${LOOPDEV} bs=4k count=10 conv=notrunc 2>/dev/null   sync
mkswap ${LOOPDEV}
sync
swapon ${LOOPDEV}
--> chmod 700 /usr/local/sbin/crypto-swap
* wipe -k /dev/hda2
* crypto-swap --> works!
* edit /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh:
        + outcomment:
                [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && echo "Activating swap."
                swapon -a 2> /dev/null
        + REPLACE WITH:
                [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && echo "Activating CRYPTO-swap."
                /usr/local/sbin/crypto-swap

Upon inspection of dmesg I see the following:
>Adding 1461904k swap on /dev/loop6. Priority:-1 extents:1
Looks good, no?
However, a little further I read:
>Unable to find swap-space signature

'cat /proc/swaps' gives me this output:
>Filename       Type            Size    Used    Priority
>/dev/loop6     partition       1461904 0       -1

I would greatly appreciate if someone could give me any insight into
whether I now have encrypted swap or not.

Also: do people have benchmarks how much this procedure might slow
things down? Is the encryptionloop significantly slower than
diskwrite/read speed?

Thanks for any hints -

Joh

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