Slashdot Mirror
Bitlocker No Real Threat To Decryption?
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is running a story called 'Vista encryption 'no threat' to computer forensics'. The article explains that despite some initial concerns that lawbreakers would benefit from built-in strong encryption, it's unlikely the Bitlocker technology will slow down most digital forensic analysts. What kind of measures does one need to take to make sure no one but yourself has access to your data? Is Bitlocker just good enough (keeping out your siblings) or does it miss the whole purpose of the encryption entirely?" One would hope an international criminal mastermind could do better than the encryption built into Vista.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Brain: Are you thinking what im thinking?
!
Pinky: I think so brain, but Vista locked up and we lost all the missle launch keys we stole from the NSA.
Brain: GGGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTEEEESSSS
just by knowing its no "real threat to decryption"
There is a way to implement secure backdoors. Like encrypt the encryption key with the public key of NSA and store it on the drive itself. There you go, now only NSA can read your drive.
What kind of measures does one need to take to make sure no one but yourself has access to your data?
Do what works for pirates. Bury it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Really though, I'd say Bitlocker is probably adequate for most purposes. If you're concerned about siblings, co-workers, rival companies, etc. it will hide your data. If you're trying to hide something from legal authorities, you'd best find another way to hide your data.
This article has little to do with BitLocker; it's just repeating what should be a well-known fact: unless a security mechanism is used perfectly, it is vulnerable. People rarely use security perfectly.
From the article:
Hey, there's a clever idea! I wonder where they thought up that one? I'm glad to see people aren't spending all their time worrying about Vista's DRM...
Breakfast served all day!
Just before leaving the house every day, I perform the following steps:
-----
ME (in Picard's voice):
Computer, establish a security
code for access to all data query
functions.
COMPUTER VOICE:
Enter code.
ME (in Picard's voice speaking at a breakneck speed):
Four, one, three, three, six,
eight, Tango, one, eight, one,
one, seven, one, Charlie, four,
Victor, three... eight, eight,
eight, zero, Foxtrot, six, one,
five, three, three, five, nine,
five, seven, lock.
COMPUTER VOICE:
Security code intact for all
data query functions.
-----
After that, it's just a matter of initiating a cascade force field sequence as I head out the door.
so anything said against Vista will be modded "Insightful" without the barest show of proof? news for nerds, indeed.
How can you sleep at night? you tease us with porn and the link doesn't even have porn!
It wasn't legislation it was an appellate court decision. Source: http://news.com.com/Minnesota+court+takes+dim+view +of+encryption/2100-1030_3-5718978.html
If you read past the headline, the heart of the article is not about the technological changes in Vista, but the behavior of common criminals. The forensics guys know from past experience that people don't bother to use all of the features available to them. Even if they do, seizing the computer itself (hopefully while it's on and the user is logged in) means they can do whatever the user would do to access the data.
A USB key is a neat trick to keep the wife away from your pr0n collection, but it won't do you much good if the FBI can force you to hand it over.
Just to save everyone the time....
"If you don't use encryption technologies properly, they will not serve it's purpose."
http://news.com.com/Minnesota+court+takes+dim+vie
A brief excerpt:
Ari David Levie, who was convicted of taking illegal photographs of a nude 9-year-old girl, argued on appeal that the PGP encryption utility on his computer was irrelevant and should not have been admitted as evidence during his trial. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is sold by PGP Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
But the Minnesota appeals court ruled 3-0 that the trial judge was correct to let that information be used when handing down a guilty verdict. And here's the relevant paragraph from the appeals court decision itself:
Evidence of appellant's computer usage and the presence of an encryption program on his computer was relevant to the state's case. We affirm the district court's evidentiary rulings.
I would say "encryption deemed criminal intent" is more of an interpretation by Internet journalists of the ruling than what was actually said. But it is true that if you are on trial for a crime in Minnesota, there's a precedent for the mere fact that you have PGP software on your computer to be used against you as evidence for the prosecution--despite the prosecutor's witness himself saying that PGP capable software is already available in OSX.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
One would hope an international criminal mastermind could do better than the encryption built into Vista.
Really? Personally, I would hope they write their plans on slips of paper and stash them in a shoe box. I really do not wish any success for criminal masterminds...except maybe Dr. Claw. I really thought Inspector Gadget was obnoxious.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
Change defaults.
qz
> If you're trying to hide something from legal authorities, you'd best find another way to hide your data.
But this is the point of the article and the discussion. Law enforcement and the software vendors who supply them are making a bunch of handwaving "not a problem" noise but this just puts the question onto teh table for discussion, it doesn't even start to answer it.
The question: Is BitLocker safe for really secure work? Which breaks down to smaller questions. Even when used correctly, with a TCPM chip and a good passphrase and good logoff/umount displine is the implementation and design sound? Or is this just a FUD campaign to keep the coppers buying EnCase? Is BitLocker vulnerable to attacks that other encrption solutions would defend against?
Because while, despite the Daily Hate here on Slashdot, America isn't a police state and the innocent have little to fear from their governemt unless they are crimelords, terrorists or that most dreadful scourge, a kiddie porn fiend But that isn't much comfort for the billions of huddled masses yearning to breath free in the unfree parts of the world. PGP was a godsend to political dissidents around the world, is BitLocker a useful tool for them as well or a trojan horse to help despots fill their forced labor camps with the fools who trust it with their secrets?
Democrat delenda est
All of these "BitLocker" vulnerabilities aren't actually BitLocker vulnerabilities, they're full-disk-encryption vulnerabilities. They apply just as much to my FreeBSD GBDE protected partition as they do to BitLocker, there's nothing new or even interesting in this article. (The summary "No Real Threat To Decryption" is misleading, because there is nothing about decryption in there.)
The article says that if the user was using a USB key to unlock the drive, or was in a corporate environment, investigators would be able to get access by taking the USB key or co-operating with the business owners.
It says that if the computer was on they could get access to the disk. That's only if the computer isn't locked of course, and if you were under investigation you would think the criminal would quickly press [Windows key]+L as the police burst in.
Clearly The Register has been doing lots of research to produce this article; they should try and get it published in a crypto journal.
Most importantly they seem to have completely missed the point of drive encryption; it's to protect against theft, not "investigators". Would Microsoft have built the technology into Vista in the hope that more criminals under investigation would buy Vista?
If you're being investigated no drive encryption is going to help; if they want access to your system they can just as easily use hardware keyloggers. They'll have the evidence they want long before they let you know you're being investigated.
If you want a good reason to bash BitLocker how about; it's expensive, and there are free alternatives that are just as good for guarding your data against theft.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
My recent run of paranoia got me using TrueCrypt (Free and works good!).
I think it makes more and more sense to use a VM, if you're concerned about security. You can restore it to a known safe initial state, and you can encrypt its entire world. It seems like a pretty big advantage... oh, and of course, you can move your secure environment to other host machines. Uh. Which may not be all that secure themselves, but hey. I told you this wasn't easy :)
Normally I'm all for bashing MS, but I have yet to see a great solution for this anywhere. So... if any of what I wrote above is new to you, I'd advise that you not trust your Doomsday Device plans (or, more likely, goat porn) to any OS's convenient built-in crypto.
Want to encrypt your disk securely? :)
Take a look at LUKS.
It now comes standard in the latest Debian Etch installer
So _that's_ why the ??AA are having so much trouble backing up those statistics about unlawfully copied movies/CDs/etc.--the copies have all been buried!
...that most computers won't have either the Trusted Computing Module (TCM) chip or the super-duper expensive version(s) of Vista that come with BitLocker. And even if some consumer did have all that, he'd have to figure out how to enable and configure it.
The majority of Windows users stick with the defaults. No barrier? 'Course not, because it won't be heavily used...
Depends. If you're faced with something like a TrueCrypt volume, even knowing a single file will get you pretty much nowhere. The entire volume is full of random bits, in fact, written data looks just like random data. So even if you knew there was a file.txt with contents "HELLO WORLD", you have a lot of data space to comb through. Throw into that mix that the entire file system is encrypted -- hell, you may not even know what file system you're looking for.
One key to rule them all. Brilliant idea. And no one will ever, ever, ever steal that key. And technology will never progress to the point where that key becomes crackable.
And the guarding of the "secure" back door will always be much much better than I could possibly guard the "front door," so it's no problem for my security. And of course I can still implement defense-in-depth with a back door that I can confidently rely on will never open.
Sorry, secure back doors are possible in theory. The difference between theory and practice, of course, is that in theory they are the same, but in practice, they aren't.
> beyond years and years of bruteforce processing
Or a really big botnet.
Duh.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Pinky never thinks what Brain thinks. It would be more like:
Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: I think so, Brain, but how are we going to find deep-fried pants at this hour?
Brain: I-- (sigh) just hand read me that encryption key from the screen there.
(Pinky is jumping back and forth and balancing on different pens, he falls backwards and hits the computer. Brain sighs at his own destiny of having to live with such a buffoon. Pinky dusts himself off.)
Brain: Where did you even get all those pens, anyway?
Pinky: Microsoft is giving them away! They sent ten free pens to every household in the world. (Confused) I'm not sure why, maybe because their computers are always breaking... you know, one time I was...
Brain: Nevermind that, Pinky. Just read me the encryption key from the monitor.
Pinky: What, you mean this TV doodad?
Brain: (sigh, sarcastically) Yes, Pinky. From the "TV doodad."
Pinky: Ooook, it says (pause)
Brain: Yes?
Pinky: Well that's what it says. It says (pause)
Brain: It says what, Pinky?
Pinky: Now I just told you what it says Brain, don't make me repeat myself!
Brain: (sighs, walks over to computer) What? No... No... (increasingly dismayed, anxious, ears/eyes droop down) This can't be... (Checks wires behind computer frantically)
Pinky: What's the matter, Brain? Is the TV thing gone cuckoo? I blame Rosie...
Brain: Quiet, you nitwit! I think Vista's frozen up. We've lost the encryption keys!
Pinky: Frozen Vista? Ooooooooooh what flavour is it Brain? Grape-a-melon? I loooove Grape-a-melon...
Brain: (sarcastically) Yes, Pinky, it's Grape-a-melon. (shakes head) Look, you know who's to blame for this, don't you?
Pinky: Ummmm.... The Flying Sausage People from the tea cup in outerspace?
Brain: (sigh) No, Pinky. (dramatically zooms in on his face) BILL GATES! He must've figured out we were trying to take over the world, and he wants it for himself!
Pinky: Gee, Brain, how'd you think he figured that out?
Brain: I don't know. Maybe he has a television and watches the fine Warner Brothers cartoon productions. (Pinky & Brain grin at camera)
(Commercial Break)
(Scene: Pinky and Brain riding the bus)
Pinky: Narf! Brain, where are we going again? Candycane Island?
Brain: (sigh) We're going to Redmond to find Bill Gates to steal his plan to take over the world!
Fat tourist passenger in front of them: That's funny! The wife and I are going to see their fabulous dog park!
Brain: I see. Would you excuse me a moment? (takes a magazine and makes a makeshift "wall" blocking the tourist's face from looking at him)
Pinky: (looking out window) Ooooooh, that's a big building! What's that?
Brain: (not looking) That's Microsoft Campus, and it's more than just a building--
Pinky: But what's that giant towering doodilly with the spinning whatchamacallit on top?
Brain: (looks out window) I told you, Pinky, it's-- Good Lord! Microsoft has built a mind control tower!
(Commerical Break)
(Scene: Bill Gates in Microsoft Mind Control Tower)
Gates: (Nerdish evil laugh) They said I was crazy! All those people that called me a nerd! (adjusts glasses, pocket protector) Well now we'll see who the nerd is!
Ballmer: (foaming at the mouth, shirt sweat-stained, resembling a dog more than a man) YEAH! GET 'EM BILL! GET 'EM! MAKE 'EM PAY! RRRRRRRRRRR!!! (throws chair)
(Gates looks over the control panel. There is a knob to hike the world's pants u
One major advantage of TrueCrypt: works on both Linux and Windows. Can't remember if there's a Mac version. Nope, there isn't. Here's the TrueCrypt web site.
... and most of all, it's usable: it exists and is easy to use. Because, much as crypto-security fascinates me, I don't want to tinker all the time.
Having researched TrueCrypt and compared the alternatives, I have started using it routinely. It's not so much that I have something to hide, or that what I want kept private requires as strong an encryption as TrueCrypt. It's more than I simply want a convenient way to encrypt something, forget about it, and not have to worry about it later.
My personal financial data resides in a TrueCrypt volume. To lock up all of those files, I just umount the volume, and that's it.
I also wanted to make an offsite backup of our more valuable personal data in case of disaster, such as a fire that burns down our home, destroying the backups stored at home. For example, we have some digital photos with some irreplaceable priceless memories. So I decided to burn them onto DVD and have my relatives, who live out of town, hang onto copies. But relatives can be nosy, and interspersed in the photos could be things I don't want other people to see, from badly taken photos that "make me look fat" to photos of bank statements and legal documents for which we wanted to store a non-paper copy.
So, I created TrueCrypt volumes of the appropriate size to burn to DVD, and then stashed our photos inside. We've got about 4 years' worth of photos (JPEGs) on two (different) DVDs with our relatives in two locations.
I don't want to encrypt something with cheap encryption, and then worry 4 years down the road when someone discovers a flaw in the scheme. You might ask, "What? Are your non-geek relatives going to go about cracking your encryption?" You never know. What if I become someone --let's not say famous, but prominent? Say some sort of social activist fighting for software freedom? Who knows what could happen to my offsite backup DVDs in 4 years --suppose some hired maid accidentally dumps them in the trash, and are noticed by the neighbourhood trash-diving geek? What if some big company or other enemy happens to get their hands on copies and try to use some embarrassing photos to pressure me? I want to be able to rip off my tinfoil hat and laugh, "Don't be ridiculous! That would never happen!"
TrueCrypt gives me that peace of mind. Among its other features is multiple scheme encryption. Are you worried that AES might get cracked next year? Encrypt with AES, and then encrypt the result with Blowfish.[1] Or Twofish first, then CAST5. TrueCrypt offers multiple options, and it does not store the result anywhere. How does it know that you used AES-then-Blowfish encryption? Because it tries all of the schemes one by one. It tries AES alone with the password you gave. Doesn't work. Tries Blowfish alone. Tries about half a dozen other single-encryption schemes. Then it tries the multiple combinations: Blowfish-Serpent, then AES-Blowfish, etc., going down the list until something works. If nothing works, then it concludes that you entered the wrong password.
It's not a perfect solution, and one drawback with TrueCrypt is that I can't use it on my work computer where I don't have administrator rights. But otherwise it has all the advantages I'm looking for: secure, cross-platform, on-the-fly, open source freedom
Just like a screwdriver: when I want to use it, I don't want to have to Google for user manuals. I just want to do what I need with it, and not have to think about it.
---
[1]: Incidentally, the advantage of AES-with-Blowfish is *not* that you can't crack Blowfish even after the AES on your TrueCrypt file is cracked. Once your AES crypto is cracked, the password is known and the same password will be used for the Blowfish decryption. (Remember, TrueCrypt is open source --once the
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
It was true in 1843; it is true today. Why, exactly, do people continue to be deluded in gambling real money on the belief that some company supplying some cryptographic technology has people in it who are smarter than everybody else in the world?
Encryption is merely the process of protecting data for a given amount of time against an attacker with assumed resources. Obviously any infinitely smart attacker with an infinite amount of time can break any encryption method, but no one alive today will be able to break AES-128 within the next 50 years at least, and only then with a major mathematical breakthrough that would probably benefit humanity more than just the broken cipher. If we can't find a mathematical solution to breaking AES, it would take Moore's law approximately 100 years before computer technology was sufficient to break AES. 128 bit key lengths and longer were chosen explicitly to deal with the case that Moore's law will continue unabated and that mathematical breakthroughs are possible.
To put it in practical terms, every DES encrypted message is easily breakable now, but no one is really worried. DES encrypted data is now pretty much worthless. A lot of people overestimate the value of the data they encrypt, and often it's really only necessary to keep secret for a few years or decades at most. Even so, I doubt there will ever be an end to encryption, because even if P=NP there will be problems that are harder to solve than to pose. Such problems can be used for encryption as long as the ratio between the work to encrypt and decrypt is faster than breaking it by a sufficient margin which can usually be increased by lengthening the keys.
The point is -- if BitLocker is percieved to be vulnerable, it's essentially worthless. For many companies, the prospect of getting the ability to encrypt desktops without additional software can save a ton of money by allowing the firms to lease PCs.
If you have PCs with personal data on them, you must destroy or forensically wipe the hard disks before turning them back in to the leasing company -- which is expensive because it requires manual intervention or reduces the value of the asset.
If you can count on BitLocker to be secure, you don't need to care about what's on the PC.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Having just completed a Forensics bootcamp, I was frankly amazed at what the current state of the art practices are in password cracking. Even the smallest commonly used keys would take a Computer for Every Person On the Planet 300,000 years to brute force crack.
Face it, you ain't gonna get there with more horsepower.
But, the guy's a Bronco fan? Index broncos.com and add it to the dictionary. Enter his wife, daughter, marriage date, favorite car, and pets. The dictionary generation software has taken great strides in Making lists of MuffySpot1996 type entries.
Not enough to crack your password? Hmm. Better hope you didn't use it with another program that happened to write it's ram to swap. The forensics tools index EVERY number and word on the drives you enter into evidence. Evidence can be data from your iPod, cellphone, and PDA. It can be from the exchange server and it can be from hotmail.com
Is he Russian? Add the russian dictionary to the search.
So, here's what we have: a Custom dictionary, Russian and English dictionaries, an index of every unique character string captured on all removable and non-removable storage.
That's a lotta chinks in the armor. And Crooks usually aren't that smart.
It was a very enlightening class. During the lab it _easily_ guessed my tier two and three passwords...it didn't get my tier one Passwords, but I didn't enter all my evidence for submission either.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
If you're willing to throw a little money at it, that's fairly easy to ensure, actually.
First, you use a hardware security module to generate the key pair, configured to refuse to ever give up the private key. Ever. With a good HSM, even if the attacker has complete control of the device odds are slim that he can extract the key.
Second, you put this hardware security module in a secure facility, with appropriate processes in place to ensure that the HSM never leaves the building, under any circumstances, regardless of who wants it to, and that only authorized people with appropriate need have access to the HSM to use it to decrypt disks.
And technology will never progress to the point where that key becomes crackable.Barring (1) a significant mathematical breakthough and (2) a huge improvement in the practicality of large quantum computers, that won't happen. It's easy enough to use a sufficiently large key that Moore's law would have to continue unabated for millions of years to make a brute force search feasible.
And the guarding of the "secure" back door will always be much much better than I could possibly guard the "front door," so it's no problem for my security.Assuming it's not the NSA that wants your data. OTOH, if the NSA wants your data badly enough, they're almost certainly going to get it. Unless you're dead.
The biggest problem with this sort of backdoor, IMO, is that it's too easy for the user to defeat. All the user has to do is to overwrite the copy of the disk encryption key that is encrypted with the NSA key with some random data. The system could be designed to make that difficult, of course, but it will never be impossible, not on a general-purpose computer.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In other words, Microsoft really hasn't learned much about security over the last 10 years. They still design security systems that are prone to operating in insecurely. This looks like the "Do you want to run this ActiveX control?" dialog all over again.
http://outcampaign.org/
So, if you're on trial in Minnesota, you'd better not be using a Mac? Or Linux, since many distributions also include GnuPG.
Conclusion: Use Windows to be safe. It's encryption software is bad enough to not make you go to jail.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Which doesn't, in practice, prevent them from doing surveillance of Americans.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Smart crooks sell Vista
It is true encryption is used to protect confidentiality and also [possibly] true this implementation is deficient.
However...
One reason for its use - even in a weak state - is to remove plausible denials.
If I always weakly encrypt an item [and always protect it properly.....] and then at some later stage you show you have access to it that implies that you deliberately accessed it. You had to make a positive action to get to it. You cannot claim that you "accidentally" stumbled on it or that it was published.
Passwording some activities (even with weak passwords) serves a similar purpose.
In both cases the protection is not against determined attackers, rather against accidental leaks.
And all the pieces fall into place...
Ever wondered what cretin was responsible for making you hold the power button in for about 10 seconds before the computer will turn off and why they did it? Now we know - the time betwen your door being knocked down and you knocking the computer off has a confortable 10 seconds (excluding reaction time) for you to be stopped built in...
Unless you hit reboot and then power - then it'll go down immediately. The fascists are foiled again!
FGD 135
I have no idea where the poster lives, but you seem to live in a country without a sense of humour.
The indiscriminate use of vulgar language is the linguistic crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker
Simply edit the bitlocker.conf file and make the following change:
Change the field:
ENCRYPT_KEY: ROT13
to
ENCRYPT_KEY: ROT12
[Insert pithy quote here]