I’m planning to set up LUKS on an SSD. Many guides are suggesting using a simple key to set things up and then revoke it when everything is in place.

Given the wear leveling behavior on SSDs I am assuming a simple key might be able to unlock even beyond the revocation if a determined attacker has the disk. I don’t want someone to be able to put the disk in factory access mode and be able to brute force attempt their way to browser cookies and email accounts.

I’m going to ignore the suggestion about using a weak key to set up, but am I being overly paranoid? Am I being not paranoid enough and I should also not rely on revocation for a spinning rust disk?

  • solrize@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Use cryptsetup and it should handle key creation for you. I’ve never heard this but about key revision. How are you supposed to use the disk if the key is revoked?

    Hdd’s have bad block remapping sort of like ssd’s, so the same issues apply to both types of media.

      • jkrtn@lemmy.mlOP
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        9 months ago

        Yes. Some guides suggest, say, “just use ‘key’ for now, we’ll replace it later.” I didn’t mention their step adding a stronger key, I guess I didn’t see that as an important part of the question.

        • solrize@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I’ve never done it that way and don’t see the benefit. Am I missing something? Of course for a testing setup just do something easy. But don’t store any sensitive data under a weak key, ever.