linux/Documentation/device-mapper/dm-crypt.txt
Milan Broz 772ae5f54d dm crypt: optionally support discard requests
Add optional parameter field to dmcrypt table and support
"allow_discards" option.

Discard requests bypass crypt queue processing. Bio is simple remapped
to underlying device.

Note that discard will be never enabled by default because of security
consequences.  It is up to the administrator to enable it for encrypted
devices.

(Note that userspace cryptsetup does not understand new optional
parameters yet.  Support for this will come later.  Until then, you
should use 'dmsetup' to enable and disable this.)

Signed-off-by: Milan Broz <mbroz@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
2011-08-02 12:32:08 +01:00

77 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext

dm-crypt
=========
Device-Mapper's "crypt" target provides transparent encryption of block devices
using the kernel crypto API.
Parameters: <cipher> <key> <iv_offset> <device path> \
<offset> [<#opt_params> <opt_params>]
<cipher>
Encryption cipher and an optional IV generation mode.
(In format cipher[:keycount]-chainmode-ivopts:ivmode).
Examples:
des
aes-cbc-essiv:sha256
twofish-ecb
/proc/crypto contains supported crypto modes
<key>
Key used for encryption. It is encoded as a hexadecimal number.
You can only use key sizes that are valid for the selected cipher.
<keycount>
Multi-key compatibility mode. You can define <keycount> keys and
then sectors are encrypted according to their offsets (sector 0 uses key0;
sector 1 uses key1 etc.). <keycount> must be a power of two.
<iv_offset>
The IV offset is a sector count that is added to the sector number
before creating the IV.
<device path>
This is the device that is going to be used as backend and contains the
encrypted data. You can specify it as a path like /dev/xxx or a device
number <major>:<minor>.
<offset>
Starting sector within the device where the encrypted data begins.
<#opt_params>
Number of optional parameters. If there are no optional parameters,
the optional paramaters section can be skipped or #opt_params can be zero.
Otherwise #opt_params is the number of following arguments.
Example of optional parameters section:
1 allow_discards
allow_discards
Block discard requests (a.k.a. TRIM) are passed through the crypt device.
The default is to ignore discard requests.
WARNING: Assess the specific security risks carefully before enabling this
option. For example, allowing discards on encrypted devices may lead to
the leak of information about the ciphertext device (filesystem type,
used space etc.) if the discarded blocks can be located easily on the
device later.
Example scripts
===============
LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is now the preferred way to set up disk
encryption with dm-crypt using the 'cryptsetup' utility, see
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
[[
#!/bin/sh
# Create a crypt device using dmsetup
dmsetup create crypt1 --table "0 `blockdev --getsize $1` crypt aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 babebabebabebabebabebabebabebabe 0 $1 0"
]]
[[
#!/bin/sh
# Create a crypt device using cryptsetup and LUKS header with default cipher
cryptsetup luksFormat $1
cryptsetup luksOpen $1 crypt1
]]