Ubuntu Private Folder

I’ve been using full home directory encryption in my Ubuntu system for awhile. Although it works very well, there’s a slight performance impact. Not a big deal, but still, I don’t need to encrypt everything in my home directory, just some sensitive stuff. I decided to decrypt it, but still use an encrypted «Private» folder for sensitive files.

To create a Private folder, I used the ecryptfs-setup-private command. This was fairly straightforward. The interesting part came later: using symbolic links to allow applications to find sensitive data in the Private folder.

First, let’s move the Firefox passwords:

mkdir ~/Private/Firefox
mv ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/{key3.db,signons.sqlite} ~/Private/Firefox
ln -s ~/Private/Firefox/* ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/

Next step, my Bitcoin wallet, stored in ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat:

mkdir ~/Private/Bitcoin
mv ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat ~/Private/Bitcoin
ln -s ~/Private/Bitcoin/wallet.dat ~/.bitcoin/

Finally, the GnuPG keys:

mv ~/.gnupg ~/Private

Other sensitive files that aren’t related to any particular application I can also place in the Private folder to protect them from eavesdroppers. Now I don’t have to encrypt my whole home folder to protect a few sensitive files. In any case, full home directory encryption works very well in Ubuntu, and is the fastest encryption overlay I’ve used.