Can you encrypt a hard disk with gpg?

Can you encrypt a hard disk with gpg? Is there any tool to do that?

rake

Posted 2012-09-03T11:03:22.973

Reputation: 181

Most OS'ses allow you to access a HDD as a file. So technically it is possible. I suspect that it will not do what you want though. – Hennes – 2012-09-03T12:27:10.860

3Why do you want to do that? What is your use case? – Der Hochstapler – 2012-09-03T14:49:52.297

The commercial PGP used to have "PGP Disk". – user1686 – 2012-09-03T16:42:28.773

Answers

You can do this using GPG encrypted loopback disks. This page explains the concept like so:

My intention was to be able to secure some data by encrypting them with a GPG key, but not have to create a new partition on my disk. Also, I wanted to do easy backups by just backing up a single file. I also wanted to be sure that I would still be able to recover everything in case my disk encryption GPG key was lost. Since I am not aware of any systems that do this automatically, I just combined loopback devices, luks and GPG into a set of bash scripts.

Brett

Posted 2012-09-03T11:03:22.973

Reputation: 199

Even if it's possible, it probably isn't a good solution because disk encryption needs to be a transparent layer between OS and disk due to the continuous I/O.

Ansgar Wiechers

Posted 2012-09-03T11:03:22.973

Reputation: 4 860

It's certainly much more practical than encrypting each and every file individually and has the same performance. – Sedat Kapanoglu – 2014-05-29T22:43:09.303