AES Encryption

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Does the My book live or any of the WD NAS drives have AES excrption to prtect teh contents of the drive ?

The manual seems to allow you to set up usernames and password for anyone trying to connect over your network and an admin password for settings but what about if someone was to steal it and plug it into their network ? 

2

I don’t think it does…

3

The My Book Live does not have password encryption/bitlocker-type on it. It can be reset if you put a password on it. 

If you are looking for a way to keep your drive from being accessible in case of theft, you’d want to use one of our USB drives.

The latest My Passport Elite and Essential are portable and provide a password lock. If you prefer a stationary USB drive, the My Book Essential and Elite both have the same Password Protection and Hardware Encryption.

Passport

My Book

4

Any plans to add encryption surely it makes a lot of sense to if your added all your digital media to your home network to secure it too ?

What do you mean “It can be reset if you put a password on it” teh data is still un-encrypted ?

5

You can change the Admin password on the drive, however doing a reset using the inset button on the back of the WD Network Drive will revert the Admin password back to its original default password. It will also reset all network settings.

The Passport and My Book USB drives cannot be reset in that manner. If you have forgotten your password, there is no way to recover it. The data will be inaccessible. The encryption is maintained using Smartware.

6

Hello,

I had the same question. Since the underlying WD Mybook Live Firmware (Linux) supports disk encryption out of the box, it should be made available. It would be enough if you have to unlock the box once (e.g. via Web UI) after booting it, and it automatically locks when losing power (i.e. somebody steals it).

It would probably also be enough if only the /DataVolume partition (where the shares are located) is encrypted.

Unfortunately, the system firmware is missing some required modules to enable encryption. A firmware update would be able to fix that. 

I have also entered this into your Community forum as a suggestion. For me, drive encryption is essential, but network connectivity is also essential. I would probably buy several Mybook Lives if they could be encrypted. 

Thank you!

7

Encryption poses a number of issues. Technically it is easy to do, but there are business decisions behind it (not being able to sell to certain countries).

8

I understand.

But please enable enough modules in the WD default kernel so one can implement it without having to recompile half the system. I don’t need a GUI to set it up for myself.

The AES kernel modules are installed, so shipping the actual encryption code does not seem to be the problem. But the WD kernel is missing ‘dm_mod’ and associated device-mapper modules to actually _use_ the AES features.

If I can SSH into the box and follow instructions like these

https://we.riseup.net/debian/automatically-mount-encrypted-home

(of course, adapted for /DataVolume instead of /home), then I am happy.

Currently, this does not work because ‘dm_mod’ and ‘dm_crypt’ are not available in the WD kernel.

Thank you!

1 Like
9

It took me somewhat longer than I’d like to admit, but compiling the required modules turns out to be fairly straightforward. I’ve just got encryption running on my “my book live”, and am quite happy to post the approach here. Start off with http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/compiling-mybook-live-modules then compile (and insert):

drivers/block/cryptoloop.ko
drivers/md/dm-crypt.ko
drivers/md/dm-mod.ko

/sbin/depmod -a &&  /sbin/modprobe -av cryptoloop dm-crypt dm-mod

That’ll do it. I’ve tested using a loopback device, yet to make up my mind whether or not I want to implement it on /DataVolume or not.

Cheers