How to Encrypt and Decrypt a Partition in Raspberry Pi

Encrypting and decrypting a partition on Raspberry Pi is an important task since it helps you protect your sensitive data from the reach of an unauthorized user. The encryption process applies a mathematical algorithm to data, including partitions and disks and those users who want to access them will need a decryption key.

If you want to learn how to encrypt and decrypt a partition on Raspberry Pi, follow this article’s guidelines.

Encrypt and Decrypt a Partition in Raspberry Pi

To encrypt and decrypt a Raspberry Pi partition, follow the below-given steps:

Step 1: First install the encryption utility called cryptsetup on Raspberry Pi from the following command:

Step 2: Attach a disk drive to Raspberry Pi on which you want to create a partition. Here, in my case, it’s a USB drive, which can be found through the following command:

Step 3: Since here we are dealing with removal media, we have to unmount the drive first from the following command:

Note: The drive could be different in your case.

Step 4: To confirm the partition is unmounted, you can run the following command:

Step 5: Now format the targeted partition and create a LUKS encryption container from the following command:

Note: The LUKS encryption container helps you create an encrypted partition.

Step 6: Provide a password for the partition and verify it too.

At this point, the partition is successfully encrypted.

Decrypt a Partition

You cannot directly access the drive since it’s encrypted. To decrypt the drive, you must create a mapper for the drive and open it with the following command:

Note: You must need to provide a password for the encrypted drive you set in Step 5 and Step 6. The above command will create a mapper drive on your system, located in the “/dev/mapper”. You can confirm it from the “ls” command:

Since the drive doesn’t have a partition system, we need to create a file system for it using the following command:

Now, create a directory for the encrypted drive from the following command:

Then copy the data of the encrypted drive to that created directory from the following command:

You can check the drive type by running the following command:

You can now unmount the drive just like you do for other removal media using the following command:

Now the drive is unmounted, we should close the partition volume and dissociate the memory in the kernel from the mapping and key using the following command:

To confirm the drive is no longer available for the system, you can run the following command:

Conclusion

The Raspberry Pi users can encrypt and decrypt a partition on the system by first installing the cryptsetup utility. Then they must unmount a partition drive and perform the encryption process with the LUKS encryption container. It provides users the ability to set a strong password for a partition. Later, the users can decrypt the same partition by creating a mapper for the drive, creating a file system, and copying the encrypted partition data onto another drive. After that, they can unmount and close the partition to complete the decryption process on the Raspberry Pi system.