Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Gov't To Use Full Disk Encryption On All Computers
To address the issue of data leaks of the kind we've seen so often in the last year because of stolen or missing laptops, writes Saqib Ali, the Feds are planning to use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on all Government-owned computers. "On June 23, 2006 a Presidential Mandate was put in place requiring all agency laptops to fully encrypt data on the HDD. The U.S. Government is currently conducting the largest single side-by-side comparison and competition for the selection of a Full Disk Encryption product. The selected product will be deployed on Millions of computers in the U.S. federal government space. This implementation will end up being the largest single implementation ever, and all of the information regarding the competition is in the public domain. The evaluation will come to an end in 90 days. You can view all the vendors competing and list of requirements."
Well, on the one hand, it's a good idea to encrypt machines that contain sensitive data.
On the other hand, this is just a bandaid on their terrible information policy...The reason that they have to encrypt a zillion machines is because they store sensitive personal data on a zillion machines. Then there are multiple operating systems, levels of security, etc. All this means that compromising one machine will still be pretty easy, because when you have encryption on the crappy desktop in the mailroom where everyone surfs porn, you stop taking it seriously.
They could kill the whole problem by centralizing their data stores, and developing some secure web interfaces across enhanced encryption. That way, instead of trying to encrypt every machine, you could encrypt 50 data centers and control access locally...Hell, if I were the government I'd push all my software needs toward think clients and terminal services anyway...The average user doesn't need more, and that makes all your security problems more managable.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
That reminds me, whatever became of that ARPANET thing they were all talking about way back?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The Air Force currently requires ( in addition to the use of a "Smart Card" plugged into the machine to gain access ) a 15 char password consisting of 3 caps, 3 lower, 3 numbers, and 3 special char ( the rest is up to the user ), no proper names, dictionary words, more than 3 letters or numbers in sequence ( back or forward ), must not be the same or simular to your last 25 passwords, and you must change it every 90 days.
The net result is that most people are writing it down and storing it in some easy to access place. Previously, we had an 8 char pass that required 2 caps, 2 lower, 2 special, 2 numbers... It was short enough that you could actually remember it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I work for a multinational corporation with more than 10 K laptops, we decided to use full disk encryption more than 5 years ago.
:-(
At that time we found just 5 vendors who were qualified to deliver (after an initial pre-qualification round), and we invited them all to a specially setup testing lab: Of these 5 vendors, 3 were selling pure snake oil (encrypt the partition table and/or root directory only), it took less than 5 minutes to break into each of these.
Nr 4 seemed a lot better, but after 20 minutes work I found the crucial 'compare password, JE decrypt' sequence in the driver, and we were in.
Only the final entry (from a german company) had understood how you design a product like this:
First you encrypt, using your preferred symmetric key algorithm (AES-256 these days?), all sectors on the disk. You use some form of hash of the logical sector number as a salt when encrypting, this makes each block unique, even those that contain the same 'FDFDFDFD' freshly formatted pattern. The key you use for this is the master disk key, it is a random number generated during installation.
Next you make a small table, with room for at least two entries: User and admin.
The user entry can be modified as often as you like (we default to slightly less than once/month), while the admin key/password is constant, but unique to this particular PC.
Each password (user/admin) is used as the key when encrypting the master key, which means that there is no way, even for the crypto architect, to recover the master key without knowing at least one of these passwords. (The passwords are never stored anywhere on the disk of course!)
The admin key/password is saved both as a printout and on disk on a secure system (without any form of network connection), so that you can use it each time a user manages to forget his/her user disk password.
There are lots of nice to have features as well, one of the more important is the ability to use a challenge/response setup to safely regenerate a user password remotely, without ever having to transmit the relevant admin key. This does require some kind of side channel to verify the identity of the user who owns the particular laptop: We use a combination of RSA's SecureID cards and the user's cell phone for this (each user has such a card to be able to use the corporate VPN connection which requires strong authentication).
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
And, you'd be the first one to cry to the f*&king heavens as soon as the Government let YOUR secrets out in the open. Or when a government, controlled by a political party other than your chosen favorite, screwed up in a major way when Intelligence is released into the wild.
Find a government on the planet that does as you desire, I'll show you mythology. Only those seeking the downfall of a political system, or governing body require that body to release all its secrets. When that body is your government, then you meet the definition of "Traitor".
Whether controlled by Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians (mythological political party), The Raving Loons of Parump, the government must keep secrets and protect select information from release until such a time that its release is no longer a harm to the citizens and country.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I hate to sound like a dick, but....good!
By being forced to develop your software as a restricted user, you're forced to ensure that your software will run with restricted user privileges. You're forced to use the proper means of determining the user's home directory, their temp directory, etc. You're forced to use the HKCU registry to store any registry items. You're forced to make the software multiuser-capable.
That's the way it should be. If most software had been written like that from the beginning, Windows would probably be a lot more secure for the general population because they would be able to comfortably run as a restricted user and know that all their software would Just Work.
So while it may be more painful as a developer to run as a restricted user, the pain does have a rather substantial payoff. Hopefully that'll make the pain a bit more bearable.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.