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Dropbear

Remote unlock encrypted root filesystems over SSH on boot.

Migrated to ansible collection

Use r_pufky.deb.dropbear.

Warning

Most systems do not encrypt /boot and therefore dropbear keys should be considered compromised/untrusted; use separate keys when using dropbear!

Tip

  • Dropbear host identification keys are a special format, not a standard SSH keypair.
  • Dropbear host keys are binary files and cannot be stored encrypted in the {host,group}_vars directory. Ansible will try to automatically decrypt this file and fail due to UTF-8 encoding issues. Storing within ansible but outside of {host,group}_vars to prevent decryption until the binary file is copied, wherein the decryption happens correctly.
  • Remote Unlock using the dropbear key ssh -i ~/.ssh/dropbear root@remote_host.

See Wireguard to enable wireguard service on boot for fully encrypted remote boot root FS unlock.

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