How To Secure Your Hard Disk By Using Full Disk Encryption In Ubuntu

Full Disk Encryption (FDE) from the term itself most of you will understand the geeky thing behind the topic. Ubuntu consider to be a one of the secured open source operating system as like the consideration it also have lots of security features with in,  as it build up on the Linux kernels. Most of the Linux distributions has this Full Disk Encryption feature to increase the security of the Laptop / PC, But until the last release of Ubuntu 12.10 this Full Disk Encryption feature was like the fruit hidden under the leaves. Most of the non technical users didn’t know the existence of this feature and install the operating system over their Laptop / PC without the encryption.

How Full Disk Encryption (FDE) secures the data on Laptop / PC’s HDD

There are lost of circumstances which makes your personal data accessed by the third person without your knowledge. It may occur by missing your laptop unfortunately or you may sold your old computer and so on, In those situations there is a major possibility of accessing your data by unknown third persons will occur. To prevent these type of access, from Ubuntu 12.10 release they make the FDE (Full Disk Encryption) option available at the time of installation of OS itself.

FDE (Full Disk Encryption) unlike other third party encryption software it locks and encrypt the entire HDD of the computer. It need the passphrase to decrypt the data and unlock the HDD at the time of preboot, with out the security key you cant even boot into the system and reading the data are also not possible as all the data are encrypted.

Caution : If you forget the passphrase, all your data will Lost

How to Enable the FDE (Full Disk Encryption) at the time of installation

Finally Ubuntu developers made this high security features available for all the users from their Ubuntu 12.10 release right at the stage of installation itself .

• You can simply encrypt your entire hard disk easily at the time of installation by simply click on the check box and enable the Encryption option at the time of installation and click on the continue button.

•  After that you have to provide the Security key to lock and encrypt the data in your HDD. The passphrase entered by you is the key to unlock and decrypt the HDD each time at the startup.

 Note : For more security you can also enable that “For More Security: “ Check Box. This Option encrypt the empty disk space also by writing some values in it. It take more time to finish the installation that depends up on the HDD capacity.

• After the installation finished your own secured laptop / PC is in your hand. Each time you start the computer you have to provide the passphrase at the preboot time to unlock the HDD.

Ubuntu developers finally make it possible and deliver the FDE to all the user easily by including the encryption option in “ubiquity”  a GUI live CD installer itself. All the other Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu will also get this encryption option, for example Linux Mint which derived from Ubuntu doesn’t had this Full Disk Encryption option in their previous releases. The mint version 14 version 15 is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04 so therefore making of Full Disk Encryption in Linux Mint also easy for the users too.

You must have the practice of encrypting data which make you smarter and safer

IT Security Solutions recommend to Encrypt the data to protect from data theft. Your valuable comments are welcome. Let know us your opinion via comments. If you feel this article is useful share it with your friends over social network.