How to mount an encrypted ext3 filesystem under OS X?

macos osx-snow-leopard encryption ext3 luks

23,538

Solution 1

Unfortunately there is currently no way to mount unencrypted LVM volumes in OS X, much less LUKS-encrypted volumes.

Solution 2

One really slow and "stupid" way to do this is to install a tiny linux distro in a virtual machine, let that work as a interface against the disk by sharing a folder with the host(OS X). It is completely overkill, but it will work.

23,538

viam0Zah

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

viam0Zah over 1 year

I know how to mount an ext3 filesystem in OS X with MacFUSE and fuse-ext2. But how can I mount an encrypted ext3 volume?

I have Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" running.
- Admin about 14 years
  
  Which encryption?
- Admin about 14 years
  
  @Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams: AES 128 with a SHA256 hashing.
- Admin about 14 years
  
  The algorithm doesn't matter. The mechanism does. TrueCrypt? LUKS? Something else?
- Admin about 14 years
  
  @Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams: LUKS.
- Admin almost 10 years
  
  See also: apple.stackexchange.com/questions/92312/…
- Admin almost 8 years
  
  askubuntu.com/questions/604554/…
- Admin over 6 years
  
  Looks like if you want portability then a better option is veracrypt/truecrypt/zulucrypt which are compatible with each other and have clients for linux, mac, windows, ios, android, etc.
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams about 14 years

It supports TrueCrypt. They want to let the community handle LUKS support.
user3333603 about 14 years

Oh. I see. I was wrong then. Well... what now? delete the answer?
viam0Zah about 14 years

So it seems the trivial answer is that I cannot mount an encrypted volume in OS X but your solution is a good workaround for my problem, though. Thanks.
SabreWolfy about 10 years

This was posted in April 2010. Have any new solutions appeared in the last 4 years?
Sherwood Wang over 8 years

It's really a compromise. LUKS is secure because it runs in the kernel space. But when doing encryption in a virtual machine, clear passphrase would be store in the user space of host machine. Some virtual machine software even maps vm memory into non-privileged user's process memory or files when suspending.