Lots of issues with encrypted storage (and password safe) on Mac

Nitrokeys Misc
16

We can not prevent macOS auto mounting the Nitrokey ourselves.

I stumbled on this while reading up on how to disable automount, maybe you can figure out if/how to use it from the Nitro app.

Point is… some people will generally want to have automount on…

It’s… understandable :wink:

But here I am with one bug report and a couple of tips for other users!

Bug: the encrypted volume stays visible after locking

To reproduce:

  • Unlock the encrypted volume
  • Create a text file on it
  • Eject the volume from Finder
  • Wait for it to reappear
  • Lock the encrypted volume
  • Go back to the Finder: the volume is still there, you can click on it, see the text file’s icon and name and even open it (with double click)

I did not think about listing the content from the shell, maybe it’s just some Finder shenanigan, however although the content of the file showed as gibberish in TextEdit, I did not get some kind of “file not found” error.

How to deal with automount

There are two options

  1. Disk Arbitrator will prevent any disk from automounting when connected, however the functionality can be accessed from the menu bar and it does not require to open Disk Utility.

  2. An entry in fstab can selectively prevent a volume from automounting

    $ cat /etc/fstab
UUID=<encrypted volume UUID> none MSDOS rw,noauto

    or

    $ cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=<encrypted volume label> none MSDOS rw,noauto

    The UUID can be found with diskutil info /Volumes/<label>.

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