I am looking for some recommendations on how to secure the data of my physical servers (against physical theft), that I am about to set up. I am new to selfhosting but have a few years of experience running Linux on a desktop.
My usecase is a simple debian(?) server at home with Paperless ngx and Tailscale for when I am away from home.
The question is how to encrypt the data while still being able to keep the server updated.
Coming from Desktop my first thought was to simply enable FDE on install. But that would mean supplying the password everytime the server needs to reboot for an update. Could someone provide some insights on how often updates to debian require a reboot?
My second thought was to use an encrypted data partition. That way the server could reboot and I could use wireguard to ssh in and open the partition even when I am away from home for a longer time.
I am open to other ideas!
I wouldn’t rely on the thief not knowing how to read linux partitions. That very well may be the case, but the person they sell your hardware to will know better, considering they are in the market of purchasing used server hardware.
I self host and my threat model is the thief selling my server to someone who knows what to do with it, but not knowing how to extract encryption keys from the memory of a running server before unpluging it. That being said I haven’t figured out encryption yet so watching this thread.