Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

Creating a private directory within an existing home directory

Let's say that you have users who, for whatever strange reason, don't want to encrypt their entire home directories, and want to keep the 755 permissions settings on their home directories so that other people can access their files. But, they also want a private directory that nobody but them can access.

Instead of encrypting an entire home directory, any user can create an encrypted private directory within his or her own home directory. The first step, if it hasn't already been done, is for someone with admin privileges to install the ecryptfs-utils package:

sudo apt install ecryptfs-utils

To create this private directory, we'll use the interactive ecryptfs-setup-private utility. ...