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When I first setup my FreeBSD NAS, I wanted to encrypt my data but still be able to take advantage of what ZFS brings. Especially since my NAS has a couple of disks.

I advice you to read up on geli & other relevant sources of information if you are going to do this. We make it convenient for ourselves with some very basic functions in my .zshrc which take care of the tedious work of re-initializing the drives when one needs to restart the host-machine

But first, we need to set things up.

We start by partitioning our drives to a single partition using gdisk . But before we do that, we wipe our drives so that we can be absolutely sure that no old partition-table is present.

Please note that this action will destroy the partitions on the hard-drive

$ gdisk ada1 GPT fdisk ( gdisk ) version 0.8.10 Partition table scan: MBR: not present BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: not present Command ( ? for help ) : x Expert Command ( ? for help ) : z About to wipe out GPT on /dev/ada1. Proceed ( Y/N ) : y

Here, x enabled us to specify special commands. The command z simply tells gdisk to wipe the partition-table on the given hard-drive & create a new GPT-header with a protective MBR.

Repeat this for every singe drive you want to incorporate in your encrypted ZFS pool. At this point we add a single partition, which size is that of the whole hard-drive.

As you probably have figured out, the following action will render the data on your hard-drive hard to get back. Keep that in mind.

$ gdisk ada1 GPT fdisk ( gdisk ) version 0.8.10 Partition table scan: MBR: not present BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: Present Command ( ? for help ) : n Partition number ( 2-128, default 1 ) : # Just press enter First sector 34-2047, default = 34 ) or { +- } size { KMGTP } : # Just press enter Last sector 35-10231090, default 10231090 ) or { +- } size { KMGTP } : # Just press enter Command ( ? for help ) : w

In our commands above, we simply create a single partition that encompasses the entire drive. Repeat this step for every hard drive you want to build your encrypted pool with.

Loading necessary kernel-modules

The kernel-modules required for geli & zfs are not necessarily loaded by a default installation of FreeBSD, and we can make sure the modules we need are loaded by running the commands kldload crypto kldload geom_eli kldload aesni , as root.

A Key, A lock & GELI

So in my case, I wanted to encrypt my array of disks using a key. Geli allows the use of a key along with a pass-phrase to be used to unlock or initialize your hard-drives.

Note that a different key & pass-phrase for each individual disk is possible, but I found this unpractical for my application. If Security is paramount I would advice you to follow a guide in a relevant scope. In my case the balance of security vs convenience tipped in the favor of convenience when deciding to go with a single key & pass-phrase.

We create a key consisting of 256 random bits using dd if=/dev/random of=./keyfile bs=256 count=1 This will create a key-file, which you must keep in a safe place. At this point we initialize our drives using geli init -s 4096 -K ./keyfile -l 256 /path/to/your/harddrive/ partition . We will be prompted to enter a pass-phrase & in our case we use the same key-phrase for all our drives. The options used in geli init boils down to -s 4096 indicating sector-size, -K ./keyfile is our key-file that geli will be using, along with a pass-phrase to unlock & attach the hard drive. -l 256 Tells geli what size our key is. You should replace /path/to/your/harddrive/partition with your actual device-path, for example /dev/ada2p1

Now we’ve initialized our hard-drives, lets attach them

Attaching geli-encrypted devices is similar to cryptsetup open in Linux. We are basically unlocking them for use, and we do this by issuing the the command geli attach -k ./keyfile /path/to/your/harddrive/partition . We will be prompted to enter our pass-phrase again, if everything went well & keys along with pass-phrases were provided correctly, Geli will have created an interface for our encrypted drive located in /dev .

For example, I attach the drive /dev/ada1p1 & geli creates /dev/ada1p1.eli .

We can now rejoice & finally create our ZFS-pool in raidz & enjoy the other fancy features of ZFS.

When my hard-drives die, my ticket to Frowntown will let me get out of there

We can now fashion together our pool of drives, in my case i will create a raidz, which will make my array more resilient towards future drive-failures.

With our newly fashioned, encrypted hard-drives we tell ZFS to do it’s magic. zpool create storage raidz ada1p1.eli ada2p1.eli ada3p1.eli Note that storage only is the chosen name of our pool, feel free to change this to whatever you want :D

When first setting up your ZFS raidz, remember to include all your prepared drives

Doing things by hand over & over sucks, let’s make it EZ (but probably insecure).

Modifying our .zshrc, we can implement some convenient functions that would make any cryptographer or paranoid person cringe & sub-tweet how horrible infosec-practice this is.

Note that since geli is detaching any attached drive when we reboot our machine. We wouldn’t want to not be ready for that. So before we reboot, power-off our machine or detach any geli-attached drive, we export our pool, using the geliclose -function mentioned below

function geliopen () { # Read password echo "OK, nobody is listening. Secret is... ?" ; read -rs PASS && echo $PASS > ./.pfile; geliattach ada1p1 geliattach ada2p1 geliattach ada3p1 geliattach ada4p1 geliattach ada5p1 sudo zpool import encrypted && echo "imported" # Reset password & remove file unset PASS && rm -P ./.pfile || echo "Failed to unset PASS and/or removing .pfile" cd ; }

We read a given pass-phrase into the variable PASS & echo the variable into a file. Then basically calls another function, geliattach which attaches a drive. The difference here is that the -j ./.pfile , which tells geli to read the pass-phrase from a file instead of prompting the user for input.

function geliattach () { ( sudo geli attach -k /usr/home/user/.keyfile -j ./.pfile /dev/ $1 && echo $1 ) || "failed attaching" ; }

When all is good & the drives have been attached correctly, we use the magic of ZFS to import our exported pool.

function geliclose () { echo " @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@" ; echo " @ W A R N I N G @" ; echo " @-----------------@" ; echo " @ ABOUT TO EXPORT @" echo " @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@" ; read ; sync; sudo zpool export encrypted; sudo geli detach ada1p1; sudo geli detach ada2p1; sudo geli detach ada3p1; sudo geli detach ada4p1; sudo geli detach ada5p1; }

Last, but not least, is our function that takes care of making sure we a), warn the user that we are about to export the ZFS pool, b), exports the pool & finally c) detach all geli attached drives. Which makes us able to do stuff like reboot, restart & gtfo.

#In summary Walking the tightrope of security vs convenience is tricky, I think that there’s definitely room for improvements in the way my functions handle variables & files when unlocking and handling geli-encrypted disks.

I must emphasize: I am convinced that the above mentioned handling of encrypted disks is not secure, but it is more convenient. If you spot some flaw; Please let me know

Even though passing -P to rm for overwriting the pass-phrase-file with zeroes, there’s a good chance that the data from the pass-phrase file might still be there. If you are using ZFS, there’s a good chance its much more tricky (if not impossible) making sure that data disappears . An option would be to just echo the pass-phrase & piping the output to geli, which reads the pass-phrase from std-in.

I don’t know if simply unsetting the variable PASS will clear it’s location in memory. I am assuming that our shell of choice frees the variable’s place in memory.

Updated on 2014-10-23 - Keltounet informed me that setting the option copies=2 , actually doesn’t help if hard-drives would fail. The answer to this question on serverfault explains it pretty well.

Added a paragraph explaining how to load the relevant kernel-modules.