Cryptmount - Create encrypted file systems

cryptmount 1

Keep our important information safe every day it gets a little more complicated, this is due to the great evolution of attacks from hackers, in which they no longer only deal with obtaining bank access credentials but now take advantage of any data or file obtained.

Esto has been seen in recent months with ransomware attacks in which they demand payment through cryptocurrencies, transfers and even where they extort you by asking for compromising photos.

En Linux we have different protection methods of our information, from encrypting the storage unit, encrypting files, folders and more.

That is why this time we will take the opportunity to talk about a utility that will allow us to store information in an encrypted image.

Cryptomount is a utility for GNU / Linux that allows a common user to manage encrypted file systems, it also allows you to mount an encrypted file system without requiring superuser privileges.

Use the device mapper and dm-crypt infrastructure to provide transparent encryption of file systems stored on disk partitions or within common files.

Cryptmount features

This application was written to make it easier for ordinary users to access encrypted file systems on demand using the new devmapper typing, as was using the older, now deprecated cryptoloop methods.

Esto offers the following advantages:

  • access to improved functionality in the kernel
  • transparent support for file systems stored on raw disk partitions or loopback files
  • separate encryption of file system access keys, enabling access passwords to be changed without re-encrypting the entire file system
  • storing multiple encrypted file systems within a single disk partition, using a designated subset of blocks for each
  • rarely used file systems do not need to be mounted at system startup
  • unmounting of each file system is locked, so it can only be done by the user who mounted it or the superuser.
  • encrypted file systems supported by cryptsetup
  • Encrypted passwords can be chosen to be openssl compatible, or managed via libgcrypt, or (for version 2.0 series) with built-in SHA1 / Blowfish tags
  • support for encrypted swap partitions (superuser only)
  • support for configuring encrypted or crypto-swap filesystems at system boot

cryptmount

How to install cryptmount on Linux?

In order to install this application on our system, in some distributions the application is included.

For install cryptmount on Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, we must open a terminal and execute the following command:

sudo apt install cryptmount

To install it on Arch Linux and derivatives, the application is within the AUR repositories and they must have the repository enabled in their pacman.conf file, we only install with:

yaourt -S cryptmount

For the rest of the distributions must download the source code of the application and compile it, for this they download it from this link.

How to use cryptmount?

To start using the tool on our team, we must open a terminal and execute the following command:

sudo cryptmount-setup

When executing this command, the application will start and will ask us a series of questions with which cryptmount will begin to configure the encryption system.

Among the questions that it will ask us is the destination path for the file system, name of the file system, what size it will contain, a password and others.

Already done this process, to be able to access our newly created system we can access it by typing the following command:

cryptmount nombredetusistema

To unmount the file system we simply type the following:

cryptmount -u nombredetusistema

If you want to know a little more about this utility you can read the following section where they further explain the application's usage and parameters.


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