Re: [LUG] Encrypt a USB flash drive

[Andy Collyer <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

- So can anyone come up with some suggestions please?

We use luks format, not quite "ask for a password" because we use a key 
file but you could just as easily create the encrypted device using a 
password.  Very basics to get you started (e.g. disk at /dev/sdb1):

Format device:
$ cryptsetup --verbose --key-file /path/to/private-key luksFormat /dev/sdb1

Open device:
$ cryptsetup --key-file /path/to/private-key luksOpen /dev/sdb1 sdb1

Once you've opened the physical device, you can do anything you can 
normally do using the mapped device name, in this case:
/dev/mapper/sdb1 (because that was what we called it in the open), e.g.

$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/sdb1
$ mount /dev/mapper/sdb1 /mnt/archive

Unmount if applicable, then close:
$ cryptsetup luksClose sdb1

HTH,
Andy C




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