recovery from ecryptfs encrypted home folders not usable for beginners

[Paolino Paperino]

It is not easy and straightforward for inexperienced users to recover their own data from a home directory encrypted with ecryptfs using only an Ubuntu 9.10 live CD.
The average user should be able to access his encrypted data using only the Ubuntu 9.10 live CD, acting as "ubuntu" generic user, with only one click. The only data the user should be asked for is the login password of the home directory the user is accessing to.
The system should attend to automatically recover the mount passphrase, add it to the kernel keyring. and mount the encrypted home directory.

Sorry for bad English, I am Italian-only speaking.

[Hercules_100_98 (hercules-100-98)]

I understand your issue but the whole point of having the home folder encrypted is that recovering it with something like a live CD isn't exactly easy. Having it any other way would pose a security risk.

I do agree that inexperienced users would be totally lost trying to do it, and most will not have bothered to retain a copy of the encryption key.

Sounds like some discussion is needed to see if a solution can be found to accomodate everyone

[Paolino Paperino (paolinodnlms)]

I disagree with you about the security risk. In my opinion the only thing a person should need to recover his own data is a reasonable secure password, and one that the user can choose by himself. To make the recovery process cumbersome for average user it is not a gain in security, because average malicious attacker actually _has_ the knowledge to recover the passphrase starting from the user's password and then to mount the disk. Thus the user password strength is the only point on which we should concentrate on in order to increase security. In my opinion the way ecryptfs is implemented in KK is only an hassle for the average user without being a benefit in security improvement

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Thank you for bringing this bug to our attention. However, a paper cut should be a small usability issue , in the default Ubuntu 9.10 install , that affects many people and is quick and easy to fix. So this bug can't be addressed as part of the project.

as per comment#1 not a papercut.

For further info about papercuts criteria , pls read > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut

Don't worry though, This bug has been marked as "invalid" ONLY in the papercuts project.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

I believe this should be fixed in Ubuntu Natty. See Bug #689969.

Check out the 'ecryptfs-recover-private' utility and the manpage, 'man ecryptfs-recover-private'.

Thanks,
Dustin

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running only once:
apport-collect 483933

and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

This issue has sat with a status of 'Incomplete' for more than four years now without any response to comment #5 so it is being closed as 'Invalid' as the issue was most probably fixed in another package.

Please feel free to re-open this bug report if this is still an issue when using a currently supported release of Ubuntu and tell us in which release you still experience this issue.