Police Need 90 Days To Crack Hard Drives

Twyko64 writes "The UK police may need 90 days to hold terrorist suspects because it takes that long to crack a suspect's PC hard drive." From the article: "Combining the analysis, the translation and second stage analysis, add inter-country co-operation and interview strategy formation, and from the police point of view, the existing 14 days is inadequate and 90 days doesn't look excessive. Another factor is encryption sophistication. If 256-bit triple-DES or similar techniques are used then decryption could require supercomputer-levels of cracking."

Comments

Blatantly WRONG

[Work Account]

Most times a police department cannot even ANALYZE data properly if a machine is not running some modern form of Microsoft Windows on an x86 platform.

They have automated TOOLS that go through and find Web browser histories, caches, and cookies.

On machines where users do not run Microsoft Internet Explorer and use Outlook for email, often times departments are SOL.

Re:They're really going to hate it when...

[TWX]

What if I don't use a programmed algorithm?

The old "manipulate the image in the picture" effect would allow me to hide data in an image, and it could be done to where only modifying the image to specific hue or color adjustments reveals the data. It would be something that someone could memorize, and open files read-only to find, modify in RAM, and never save back to the drive once the message is known. There could be thousands of photos in someone's photo album, and only a few that actually contain data too, so that it's hard to even find the files used, let alone to figure out how they're used.

I could also know that certain letters in a text file based on some derivation of a number sequence for position of the letter or word is the message. Anyone that I'm corresponding with could also know the sequence, but if neither party writes it down then it's much harder. It would also work for storage of sensitive data, and be even better security since there'd be only one person who'd know how to recover it.

The most effective way to hide something or protect something is to ensure that nothing is ever written down about recovering it, ever. If there's no key to find then it's again down to brute force.