limitations imposed by the LUKS security model BEFORE you face such
a disaster!
- Specific warnings:
+ PASSPHRASES: Some people have had difficulties when upgrading
+ distributions. It is highly advisable to only use the 94 printable
+ characters from the first 128 characters of the ASCII table, as
+ they will always have the same binary representation. Other
+ characters may have different encoding depending on system
+ configuration and your passphrase will not work with a different
+ encoding. A table of the standardized first 128 ASCII caracters
+ can, e.g. be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
+
+
+ * System Specific warnings
- Ubuntu as of 4/2011: It seems the installer offers to create
LUKS partitions in a way that several people mistook for an offer
* Is LUKS secure with a low-entropy (bad) passphrase?
+ Note: You should only use the 94 printable characters from 7 bit
+ ASCII code to prevent your passphrase from failing when the
+ character encoding changes, e.g. because of a system upgrade, see
+ also the note at the very start of this FAQ under "WARNINGS".
+
This needs a bit of theory. The quality of your passphrase is
directly related to its entropy (information theoretic, not
thermodynamic). The entropy says how many bits of "uncertainty" or