{"id":221122,"date":"2026-03-07T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/07\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/"},"modified":"2026-03-07T18:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T23:55:10","slug":"remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/07\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/","title":{"rendered":"Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/03\/06\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/\">Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/03\/06\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/\">https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/03\/06\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-07 01:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"hackaday.com\">hackaday.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Can you remotely unlock an encrypted hard disk? [Jyn] needed to unlock their home server after it rebooted even if they weren\u2019t home. Normally, they used Tailscale to remote in, but you can\u2019t use tailscale to connect to the machine before the hard drive decrypts, right? Well, you can, sort of, and [Jyn] explains how.<\/p>\n<p>The entertaining post points out something you probably knew, but never thought much about. When your Linux box boots, it starts a very tiny compressed Linux in RAM. On [Jyn\u2019s] machine using Arch, this is the initramfs.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not news, but because it is an actual limited Linux system (including systemd), you can add tools to it. In this case, adding dropbear (an ssh server) and Tailscale to the limited boot-time Linux.<\/p>\n<p>Doing this in the most straightforward way presents several issues related to security. However, using a few configuration items, you can limit it to showing the unlock screen and nothing else.<\/p>\n<p>The only limitation is that the setup, as written, will only work with an Ethernet interface. WiFi should be possible, but getting the wireless network up in this environment would likely be challenging.<\/p>\n<p>You could probably set this up with WireGuard or even an ssh tunnel if you were adventurous.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/03\/06\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/03\/06\/remotely-unlocking-an-encrypted-hard-disk\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-07 01:00:00 Source Domain: hackaday.com Can&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":221123,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/lucs.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71,57],"class_list":["post-221122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":221124,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221122\/revisions\/221124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}