I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used disk encryption. Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows have been increasingly using encryption by default. On the other hand, while most Linux installers I’ve encountered include the option to encrypt, it is not selected by default.
Whether it’s a test bench, beater laptop, NAS, or daily driver, I encrypt for peace of mind. Whatever I end up doing on my machines, I can be pretty confident my data won’t end up in the wrong hands if the drive is stolen or lost and can be erased by simply overwriting the LUKS header. Recovering from an unbootable state or copying files out from an encrypted boot drive only takes a couple more commands compared to an unencrypted setup.
But that’s just me and I’m curious to hear what other reasons to encrypt or not to encrypt are out there.
There is a major downside to encryption: If you forget your password or your tpm fails and you’ve not backed things up, then that data is gone forever. If someone doesn’t have anything incriminating or useful to theives on their device, the easier reparability might justify not enabling it.
Why is this a problem for us and not for ordinary dummies on Android? It’s been the default there for years already.
Phones make the encryption invisible to the user.
That’s not the case on Linux unless you’re willing to put in a bit of work to set up TPM unlocking yourself or use one of the few distros that use TPM by default, like Aeon.
And even then Aeon’s not perfect. Sooner or later the TPM will fail and you’ll have to enter your long backup password and reenroll the TPM.
Yep. But typing in a password at boot is no big deal and you do then get some of the benefits of encryption. The problem, as you seem to be hinting, is the lockscreen issue. A screenlocked OS without the hardware encryption module is not actually locked down whereas Android, for instance, is. Is that right? I’ve wanted to ask how Android does this - basically, it loses the key and then regenerates it based on biometrics or whatever, each time you unlock, is that it?
Android backs up data to the cloud. If the phone breaks or gets stolen, you don’t need to recover data from it - you can just pull it from Google’s servers.
In addition, people tend to not treat their phones as “permanent storage”. The concept of losing or breaking their phone is probably more clear, so they make sure to back it up in some way to the cloud or their desktop.
Also, it’s much more likely for a phone to be stolen than a laptop or desktop.
Android has storage encryption by default?
Why do I only need to enter 1 password?
Why would you need to enter 2?
Well, usually you don’t need to enter any password.
I’m referring to a password to unlock the screen.
That’s because you’re probably using biometrics instead.
How would I know? I don’t have to use biometrics when I restart the phone.
Then your password or more likely PIN is what is being used to generate the encryption key. Not very strong encryption but better than nothing.