The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:
- Improve the current state of accessibility
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
- Encrypt user home directories individually
- Modernize secrets storage
- Increase the range and quality of hardware support
- Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
- Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
- Consolidate and improve platform components
You can use Fuse to encrypt files on the fly using a wide assortment of schemas. The trick is to make it available at the right time to all the desktop apps (as the environment is starting up).
All of this is available already, for example I’m encrypting the files I sync to Dropbox and I mount the decrypted version to a dir on my desktop on startup. It’s not the entire home dir but you get the idea. It’s just gonna need some polish to become really smooth and user friendly.
Im most interested in encrypted homedirs for servers. Since all my collegues are to lazy to use encrypted ssh keys, i hoped that systemd-homed makes it possible to secure them from the root user.
Is systemd-homed already useable for such usecase? If gnome will do the same for desktops, that would be a big plus, thinking about firefox profiles and such. Hopefully also using pam or kerberos for decryption.
I’ll look into fuse though, thanks for the hint
It’s usable but it comes with a fair amount of manual setup. Hopefully this is the kind of thing that Gnome will improve upon.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-homed