Mounting an encrypted volume presents the volume to all users on a machine

[nodata]

On 26/10/10 07:05, Qiang Li wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-10-26 at 00:28 +0200, nodata wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm concerned about the default behaviour of mounting encrypted volumes.
>>
>> The default behaviour is that a user must know and supply a passphrase
>> in order to mount an encrypted volume. This is good: know the
>> passphrase, you get to mount the volume.
>>
>> What I am concerned about is that the volume is mounted for _every_ user
>> on the system to see.
>>
>> I've filed a bug about this, and it got closed:
>>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=646085
>>
>> I'm quite in favour of secure by default. In the worst case, the
>> mountpoint would have permissions set to read access to all if you tick
>> a box.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>
> I'd think you mixed the concept of volume encryption and permission.
> Once you supply the pass for the encrypted volume, it means that you
> grant the right to OS to mount this volume. Then the OS is in charge of
> permission settings. OS doesn't care about if it is encrypted or not, it
> only knows some volume wants to be mounted and it sets permission as the
> default schema.
>
> Qiang
>

Imagine that you want to login to the computer, your username is oiang. 
I want to login too. My username is nodata. Now, I can only login to my 
account and look at my files because only I know my password. You can 
only login to your account because only you know your password.

Now imagine if you could read all of _my_ files and I could read all of 
yours. That makes no sense. You _can_ configure that if you want, but by 
default we go for security.

This is the same. You connect your encrypted hard disk to the system and 
you can look at the files on it because you know the passphrase.

The fix to make this work is a 750 mode on /media/VOLUME-NAME