Every once in a while I need to mount an encrypted USB flash-drive to my laptop running Linux. The problem is that happens so rarely that I struggle to remember the correct sequence of commands, while setting up automounting seems unnecessary to me. Well, this short blog post is meant to address exactly that.
- Insert USB-drive and list all connected disks:
sudo fdisk -l. Note the device path of the flash-drive, typically/dev/sda1. - Next run something like
sudo cryptsetup open --type=bitlk /dev/sda1 usbto decrypt the drive. Here the device “type” is Bitlocker, but cryptsetup supports also LUKS and other types. The last argument “usb” is the name I typically choose for unencrypted mappings. Skip this step if the drive has no encryption. - Now mount the device with
sudo mount /dev/mapper/usb /mnt/usb. Here the mapper is created by cryptsetup in the previous step (use the /dev path for unencrypted drives). - This is it, you may use the drive as any other filesystem on your laptop.
- After finishing, unmount first with
sudo umount /mnt/usb, then close withsudo cryptsetup close usb.
All in all, pretty simple.