A Self-Destruct Option For Linux Disk Encryption

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 7 January 2014 at 06:17 AM EST. 29 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
The security-minded Kali Linux distribution has proposed a feature of adding "emergency self-destruction of LUKS" to their cryptsetup package when doing full-disk encrypted Linux installations.

Kali Linux has worked out the feature of being able to nuke an entire Linux drive's installation when entering a "nuke" password. For those using encrypted partitions with LVM and LUKS, there would be the option of adding a boot password to intentionally destroy the data on the drive.

Rather than your normal boot password to decrypt the drive, entering the "nuke" password would instead deletes all key slots to make accessing the drive's data impossible. Kali Linux developers have ported it to cryptsetup in a new GitHub repository as they solicit feedback on the feature they may include in their own Linux distribution and could be picked up by other Linux distributions.

More details on this self-destruction work can be found via the Kali.org site.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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