Linux Unified Key Setup
The Linux Unified Key Setup, commonly known as LUKS, is a disk encryption specification created by Clemens Fruhwirth, originally intended for GNU/Linux.
LUKS specifies a platform-independent standard on-disk format for use in various security tools. It aims at giving disk encryption software a documented and compatible format. This not only facilitates compatibility and interoperability amongst various different software, but also assures that they all implement password management in a secure and documented manner.
The reference implementation for LUKS works on GNU/Linux and is based on an enhanced version of cryptsetup, using dm-crypt as the disk encryption back-end.
LUKS has been designed to conform to the TKS1 secure key setup scheme.
Supported Linux distributions[edit]
All the modern distributions have the LUKS tools but support for actually choosing and using it during installation is variable. These distributions will let you install Linux on a LUKS-encrypted LVM container as easy as marking a check-box:
These are NOT supported:
- Mageia - It has a "expert" option for installing to a LUKS encrypted drive. So it is possible, it is just not easy.
