I installed endeavourOS 2 days ago and then, the next day, there was a newnrelease of endeavourOS. It’s supposed to have better encryption. Is it possible to upgrade encryption on Linux? An unrelated question: is it possible to change the password of an encrypted partition? I’m a beginner, so please explain your magical commands.
I assume you’re referring to this tidbit:
You can upgrade the PKDF if you want. There’s a guide in this article which assumes some preexisting technical knowledge. The commands should be simple enough, but you need to replace /dev/whatever with the path of your encrypted partition (like /dev/sda2, /dev/nvme0p2). You can find this path in the GUI disk management tool your desktop environment probably came with.
If you use systemd-boot and follow that guide, you should be able to upgrade your security without any issue. However, it’s essential to ensure that 1) you are indeed using systemd-boot, as older bootloaders like Grub don’t support all recent key derivation functions, and 2) that your systemd-boot is up to date (just install updates through the normal means your distro provides to accomplish this).
If you follow the guide, you will end up with a backup of the LUKS header which will allow you to restore the old key setup if something breaks. Be careful with that backup, because if someone with bad intentions finds it, it’ll basically undo the hard work you did to upgrade LUKS.
I’m not entirely sure how critical this upgrade is, based on the fact there’s only one scarcely reported incident where the encryption was supposedly broken. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t want the best security you can get, but it’s not like there’s a commonly known secret trick to bypass your computer’s encryption; if it exists at all, it’s hidden very well by law enforcement agencies.
As for the password question: yes, you can change the password. You can even use multiple passwords to unlock the same drive, or use password files in automated setups that are much stronger than simple passwords.
Changing the password may be as simple as opening the disk management tool and right clicking the encrypted partition, depending on what desktop environment you chose to install. EndeavourOS very much prefers customisation over standardisation so I can’t tell you what tools you have installed on your system, but common desktop environments like Gnome will have advanced disk management tools that will allow you to change the password without any command line knowledge.