I recently switched to Linux (Zorin OS) and I selected “use ZFS and encrypt” during installation. Now before I can log in it asks me “please unlock disk keystore-rpool” and I have to type in the encryption password it before I’m able to get to the login screen.
Is there a way to do this automatically like with Windows or MacOS? Zorin has biometric login which is nice but this defeats the purpose especially because the encryption password is long and tedious to type in.
Also might TPM have anything to do with this?
EDIT: Based on the responses I have to assume some of you guys live in windowless underground bunkers sealed off with concrete because door locks “aren’t secure against battering rams”. Normal people don’t need perfect encryption they just want to add an extra hurdle or two for the crackhead who steals the PC. I assumed Linux had a system similar to what Windows or MacOS has been doing for a decade but I am apparently wrong.
Afaik you can’t. Disk encryption requires entering the password every time and it asks for it BEFORE the OS is started so you can’t use biometric login either
Windows can use biometrics to unlock the TPM and authenticate the user with just one single fingerprint touch. Authentication platforms like Windows Hello use the TPM to authenticate the user, which means the TPM PIN can be used both as a “password” and as the unlock mechanism for Bitlocker disks.
I’m not aware of any Linux solution that will let you unlock the TPM with biometrics.
I should also add that last time I read about this system in Windows, someone checked three laptops and found three different ways in which an attacker could trick the biometrics into adding extra fingerprints, including the official Microsoft hardware.
Good enough for crackheads stealing the laptop and not having them be able to access your dick pics, not good enough for someone actually after your data.
That’s not technically true as enabling bitlocker on windows and filevault on Mac don’t require two different passwords.
Mac will ask you to “log in” very early in the boot process to decrypt the disk, I assume it keeps the drive key encrypted with your password somewhere.
That’s just not true I have two macs with it enabled on both and it requires a single “normal” password
That’s likely because your Macs are using the TPM. Does your Linux machine have a TPM, and are you using it?
I don’t think so, they are both intel macs over 10 years old and Macs didn’t start adding TPM until 2017. On Mac, when you check the box to encrypt the drive during install you’re prompted for an encryption password which you never need to use again unless you remove the drive and put it into another mac (or in my case add a second hard drive and use the original as “extra” storage).
Macs had TPMs before Windows PCs, IIRC.
Yes normal password but it happens super early on mine, and once you log in there is a boot progress bar afterwards. This is an Intel Mac, might be different on apple chips.
I recently dug into this because I accidentally trashed my wife’s OS which was encrypted with bitlocker. PITA btw and I couldn’t beat the encryption
Bitlocker encryption key hash is stored in 2 possible places. First is an unencrypted segment of the encrypted drive. This is bad because it’s pretty easy to read that hash and then decrypt the drive. The second place is on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) which is a chip on the motherboard. This is better because it’s much more difficult to hack. It can be done but requires soldering on extra hardware to sniff the hash while the machine boots up. Might even be destructive… I’m not sure.
Either way a motivated attacker can decrypt the drive if they have physical access. For my personal machines, I wouldn’t care about this level of scrutiny at all.
Anyways you can see if any open source solutions support TPM.
Sorry idk much about Windows and Mac. But what you said sounds like their encryption systems aren’t full disk encryption, they somehow found a way to store the password for login or they just disable the login password completely when the encryption is enabled
They are full disk encryption, and it’s using the hardware TPM.
Oh then I guess idk what TPM actually is
The TPM (trusted platform module) is a chip inside your processor (or on your motherboard) that can store cryptographic information such as encryption keys and certificates in a way that is extremely difficult to get them out without providing the proper unlock mechanism.
One method used to unlock secrets is to enter a PIN (which is alfanumeric despite the name), or by requiring an exact sequence of “measurements”. The bootloader measures “I just booted Grub”, then the kernel measures “I just started booting”, then initramfs starting is measured, etc. Combined with secure boot being configured to only boot Linux versions signed by your own key, this basically prevents the TPM from giving up its secrets unless you’ve booted the exact same operating system that stored the secure data.
These mechanisms are often combined for greater security
This automatic unlocking feature allows operating systems like Windows or Linux to encrypt the disk without ever having to enter a key. An attacker van steal the laptop, but assuming they don’t know the user password and can’t bypass the biometrics, they’ll be stuck at a secure login screen with no access to the data on disk (though LPC TPMs on the hardware can easily be eavesdropped, so this isn’t always very secure). Windows enables this mechanism by default in many configurations.
The biggest advantage is that nobody can rip out the hard drive and look at your files, nor can anyone with a boot disk just browse your files like you could back in the Windows 95-10 days.
It’s also one of the reasons Windows 11 requires modern TPMs, and doesn’t work on some relatively recent hardware without bypassing checks on the installer.