Ubuntu's Ubiquity Gains Home Encryption Support

Ubuntu 7.10 had introduced support for install-time encryption to provide a fully encrypted LVM. However, this feature was only available through Ubuntu's alternate CD installer and not Ubiquity, Ubuntu's popular LiveCD installer. We had hoped the disk encryption support would be added in Ubuntu 8.04 and then later Ubuntu 8.10, but that never occurred.

Canonical has been working on an home encrypted directory feature for Ubuntu 9.04 and here we will finally have some encryption support available through Ubiquity. We previously looked at the Ubuntu 9.04 home encryption performance, but previously it had to be setup manually after installing the needed packages or using Ubuntu's alternate CD installer. As of yesterday's package updates, this support is finally found in the LiveCD installer.

When setting up the initial user account with Ubiquity, there is now the option to choose from an automatic log-in, log-in with password, or require a password to log-in and to decrypt your home directory.

Sadly, however, there still is no support in Ubiquity for fully encrypting the disk. While our encryption benchmarks have shown that there can be a performance hit from the disk encryption, we would highly recommend some level of encryption especially if you're using a mobile device or netbook like the Samsung NC10 or ASUS Eee PC.