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I recently encrypted my laptop, but I also wrote notes on how I did it and posted those notes online. The configuration is fairly complicated and, from what I can tell, also fairly unique. I did not put any private information in it (such as UUID's, checksums, or passwords). Does releasing general information about how my system is set up make it inherently less secure?

Side question: this is my first time encrypting a system. Are there any vital flaws or security holes that I overlooked?

Caleb Reister
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  • Are you asking how [things should be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle) or are you requesting an evaluation if what you did is as things should be? – techraf Jun 22 '16 at 05:39
  • @techraf, I am asking if what I did is as should be. – Caleb Reister Jun 22 '16 at 05:42

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Yes, it does make your system less secure, since it exposes internals to the world, and the next time an exploit is detected for a service you use, you can be an early target.

That being said, it may still be a good idea. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and by Kerkchoff's principle, secrecy of your implementation should not be a precondition for security. Since it is your first implementation, and you haven't revealed how to trivially find your system, a public review can only help.

This related post concludes that security through obscurity isn't bad, as long as you are not relying only on it. Only counting on obscurity is bad. You want your system to be secure with the attacker knowing it's complete workings apart from specifically controllable secret information So I still suggest modifying everything in a few days/weeks (adding some obscurity)

Community
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Jedi
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  • Thanks for the quick response. I get why obscurity alone is not a good security measure. That being said, the unique part of my system is the partition layout (I haven't found anyone who set up their system using full-drive dm-crypt (including the boot partition) on top of LVM (to unlock everything at once) on top of btrfs (for easy backup). Also, my primary reason for setting up the encryption was to learn how to do it and to (hopefully) protect some of my private information. – Caleb Reister Jun 22 '16 at 05:55