&gt; Are you saying that bypassing the bootloader with a live USB, etc, could give an attacker access to the data stored on the encrypted drive (outside of the boot partition, of course)?<p>No, of course not. (Well, disregarding cold boot attacks).<p>But it gives access to data stored <i>inside</i> the boot partition, allowing for fun things like patching your kernel to send dm-crypt keys to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fbi.gov&#x2F;submit_key.cgi" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fbi.gov&#x2F;submit_key.cgi</a> - makes sense now?