How can I make a password protected Virtual Hard drive in Linux?
I have an Ubuntu server 20.4 installed in Virtual Box. I wanted to make a Virtual Hard Drive. So I made an Image to Hold Virtual Drive Volume and formated the EXT4 file system type in the image file with these commands.
- sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=VHD.img bs=1M count=1200
- mkfs -t ext4 VHD.img
After, I mounted the image file in the/mnt directory with this.
- mount -t auto -o loop VHD.img /mnt
This is the output of the df -HT command.
udev devtmpfs 469M 0 469M 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 103M 1.1M 102M 2% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv ext4 22G 5.6G 15G 29% /
tmpfs tmpfs 515M 1.2M 514M 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 5.3M 0 5.3M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs tmpfs 515M 0 515M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0 squashfs 74M 74M 0 100% /snap/lxd/21029
/dev/loop1 squashfs 59M 59M 0 100% /snap/core18/2128
/dev/loop3 squashfs 34M 34M 0 100% /snap/snapd/12883
/dev/loop2 squashfs 34M 34M 0 100% /snap/snapd/12704
/dev/sda2 ext4 1.1G 112M 842M 12% /boot
/dev/loop4 ext4 482M 775k 445M 1% /mnt # Image I mounted
Now I can access the /mnt directory and work with it. But I want this drive to be encrypted with a password. Meaning that when the user(even root) tries to mount it,a password must be specified in order to mount the image. My final goal is to have an image file encrypted with a password and with a size of over 400MB.
Solution 1:
A simple solution would be to use the free and open-source VeraCrypt.
It supports full-disk encryption, but also encrypted containers. A container looks like a file that requires a password for mounting, so can be used cross-platform (select for that a cross-platform file-system format).
You will find documentation on the VeraCrypt site, but also many articles on the internet.