Chapitre 11. Configuring automated unlocking of encrypted volumes using policy-based decryption

The Network Bound Disc Encryption (NBDE) is a subcategory of Policy-Based Decryption (PBD) that allows binding encrypted volumes to a special network server. The current implementation of the NBDE includes a Clevis pin for the Tang server and the Tang server itself.

In RHEL, NBDE is implemented through the following components and technologies:

Figure 11.1. NBDE scheme when using a LUKS1-encrypted volume. The luksmeta package is not used for LUKS2 volumes.

Tang is a server for binding data to network presence. It makes a system containing your data available when the system is bound to a certain secure network. Tang is stateless and does not require TLS or authentication. Unlike escrow-based solutions, where the server stores all encryption keys and has knowledge of every key ever used, Tang never interacts with any client keys, so it never gains any identifying information from the client.

Clevis is a pluggable framework for automated decryption. In NBDE, Clevis provides automated unlocking of LUKS volumes. The clevis package provides the client side of the feature.

A Clevis pin is a plug-in into the Clevis framework. One of such pins is a plug-in that implements interactions with the NBDE server — Tang.

Clevis and Tang are generic client and server components that provide network-bound encryption. In RHEL, they are used in conjunction with LUKS to encrypt and decrypt root and non-root storage volumes to accomplish Network-Bound Disk Encryption.

Both client- and server-side components use the José library to perform encryption and decryption operations.

When you begin provisioning NBDE, the Clevis pin for Tang server gets a list of the Tang server’s advertised asymmetric keys. Alternatively, since the keys are asymmetric, a list of Tang’s public keys can be distributed out of band so that clients can operate without access to the Tang server. This mode is called offline provisioning.

The Clevis pin for Tang uses one of the public keys to generate a unique, cryptographically-strong encryption key. Once the data is encrypted using this key, the key is discarded. The Clevis client should store the state produced by this provisioning operation in a convenient location. This process of encrypting data is the provisioning step.

The LUKS version 2 (LUKS2) is the default disk-encryption format in RHEL, hence, the provisioning state for NBDE is stored as a token in a LUKS2 header. The leveraging of provisioning state for NBDE by the luksmeta package is used only for volumes encrypted with LUKS1.

The Clevis pin for Tang supports both LUKS1 and LUKS2 without specification need. Clevis can encrypt plain-text files but you have to use the cryptsetup tool for encrypting block devices. See the Encrypting block devices using LUKS for more information.

When the client is ready to access its data, it loads the metadata produced in the provisioning step and it responds to recover the encryption key. This process is the recovery step.

In NBDE, Clevis binds a LUKS volume using a pin so that it can be automatically unlocked. After successful completion of the binding process, the disk can be unlocked using the provided Dracut unlocker.