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Undocumented Bypass in PGP Whole Disk Encryption
A non-mouse Coward writes "PGP Corporation's widely adopted Whole Disk Encryption product apparently has an encryption bypass feature that allows an encrypted drive to be accessed without the boot-up passphrase challenge dialog, leaving data in a vulnerable state if the drive is stolen when the bypass feature is enabled. The feature is also apparently not in the documentation that ships with the PGP product, nor the publicly available documentation on their website, but only mentioned briefly in the customer knowledge base. Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corp., responded that this feature was required by unnamed customers and that competing products have similar functionality."
"encryption bypass" ?
That basically turns the entire thing into a physiological magic trick.
Come on, why would you even consider using such a thing?
And if anyone else can enable it, then they already have access to your computer anyway.
from the response:
"We call it a passphrase bypass because that is what it is. It is a dangerous, but needed feature. If you run a business where you remotely manage computers, you need to remotely reboot them."
and
"You cannot enable the feature without cryptographic access to the volume. If you do not have it enabled, you are not affected, either. I think this is an important thing to remember. Anyone who can enable the feature can mount the volume. It is a feature for manageability, and that's often as important as security, because without manageability, you can't use a security feature."
makes pretty good sense to me
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
When it comes to encryption it is exactly for this reason why I use the "clunky", "hard to configure", "no GUI" Open Source!
I know what I have, and what I get, and what others cannot get... Not that I have anything to hide. Just that I like my privacy.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
What is the point of encrypting the drive if it's automatically decrypted? (ie. the key would be stored plaintext somewhere on the drive) I just can't figure that out.
I don't like PGP in any case. I never have because all their stuff is proprietary. S/MIME, ASN.1, etc are all full blown public standards that do the things PGP does except using open interoperable widely adapted standards.
A backdoor that's documented, although poorly, that you can disable and requires access to the unencrypted disk beforehand? If it were the NSA they wouldn't have allowed it to be documented and you couldn't disable. However, I can think of several large corporations that would require something like this and would have contracts large enough to justify changing the product for. Paranoia doesn't seem to be justified in this case.
They also just lost credibility.
Oh, I don't know. From the start, all the promised was Pretty Good Privacy. Not like Fort Knox, more like a combination padlock on an open-backed locker.
I find myself wishing more and more that Phil Zimmerman hadn't sold to NAI.
Does GPG have a full-disk mode? I think I could trust something with open source and reliable software freedom.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
What is it with everyone assuming NSA backdoor without spending the 2 seconds necessary to understand the simple concept at play here?
Some want to be able to boot their encrypted disks without having to enter a startup password. Its that simple. Yes its a stupid idea but some may have perfectly reasonable reasons for wanting it.
1. There is no backdoor.
2. The feature must be explicitly enabled.
Anyone claiming that a trojan can bypass it by setting the encryption password is wrong for two reasons:
1. If a trojan has that level of access to your system how do you intend to stop it from sending all of your data over the network, fetching your decryption key from memory structures or decrypting your whole disk without your knowledge while you sleep? If #1 is ever raised as a concern the game is already over and you have lost/0wned!
2. You need to know the decryption password to enable the feature.
As others have said, some parts of the U.S. government has become completely lawless. The government is requiring access and requiring that access be kept secret. The Bush administration has become a dictatorship. I think U.S. citizens should demand impeachment and that Cheney and the Decider be tried for treason. Why should the really big criminals be allowed to break the law?
I keep hearing that the 2nd amendment would help in this situation but I haven't noticed any militias storming the local branch of the federal administration. I think the best way to protect Democracy is probably through self-motivated knowledge seeking and political activism on how things work instead of guns, but who can argue with a MP5.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
If you RTFA, you'll see that it's a feature that you can only turn on if you've already got access to the disk, and PGP did it so it only works once.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
However, the feature isn't enabled by default. It requires cryptographic access *and* knowledge of its existence to turn it on. And if you already have cryptographic access, then the whole issue is academic.
You pompously declaring it "DISHONEST" in capital letters smacks of the typical random-geek's kneejerk first post on a messageboard thread. And FWIW, I don't know how much your oh-so-important business with them is worth anyway; I suspect that the other client probably *was* worth more. (Of course, it's quite plausible that the views of *many* smaller clients who disliked the feature would be a serious counterweight. However, if you're going to act like your *individual* view carries so much weight, expect scepticism).
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But ... PGP has a peer review, open-source process. They're just a commercial product, too. [In other words, it violates the terms of service for you to compile their source code and use it without licensing it.]
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
Hmm, the FBI paid them for having this backdoor?
1. if i have a real (paying) customer who needs this, i will supply them (and only them) with a customised version.
2. or i fully document the feature.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Yeah, it's a potentially dangerous feature - but some customers want it anyway, and at least PGP implemented it in a way that's less dangerous than it could have been. I'd have preferred to see some additional hardware involved, e.g. require input from a USB dongle or successful DHCP hit or something in addition to the disk-stored info, but it's hard to get that to work portably and reliably.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The only threat is if someone where to enable this, not reboot, and then have the machine stolen.
I see what is possibly another. I may enable a hole of this form:
If someone gets access to the disk or its contents before the reboot, they can clone the state of the encryption software - which will do one "unlocked" reboot. Later (up to a point where the encryption key is changed) they can shut down the machine, reapply this state, and bring it up without the password, gaining access to data that has been added or updated since the state was cloned.
I see ways to prevent this sort of attack. But they'd have to be built in with blocking such an attack in mind - which means the feature and defense against its corruption would have to be taken into account in the architecture of the rest of the product. (They'd also greatly increase the risk of corrupting the encryption software in a way that prevents even the authorized user from referencing the disk in case of, for instance, power problems on startup or an ungraceful shutdown.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This raises an interesting question; since the only way to achieve this functionality is to store the passphrase unencrypted (or encrypted with a calculatable key) on the hard disk, how do we know that it is erased adequately? Perhaps we should search the documentation to determine how it goes about erasing the data...
Because a backdoor can just as easily be slipped into open source software, if not more easily since everyone's assuming "Oh it's open, someone else is looking for backdoors." On top of that, when things go south there's no one to point the finger at and no one to go to for support.
Look at all the security flaws that have popped up in Firefox over the past two years that could have led to a complete security breach on a user's machine. Most were probably just innocent mistakes, but what if they were intentional? How would we know? And who could we blame?
Putting a GPL license on something doesn't automatically make it pure and holy.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I did not say that somebody who DOESN'T have a passphrase could turn the feature on. RTFA and realize that any USER (get it? Not "admin") can use this feature, enabling the bypass. Sure, today, (again, you near-sighted idiot) the only way to use this is through the command line, but this is a crypto operation, not a connection to your mom's website, meaning there is no record of who makes crypto operations. It might be a trojan (which yes, I get it, it's got your passphrase), but imagine this: a worm like the storm worm gets modified to (in addition to the myriad of things it does) capture users' passphrases, add the bypass, and modify the PGP Boot Guard to not remove the bypass
And of course, (again I'll get enjoyment for calling you an idiot) an admin who uses this feature but has an adversary pick up the device PRIOR to the reboot happening and the oh so magical PGP Boot Guard removing the bypass
This guy gets it. Why can't you?
Now go say hi to Jesse and the twins for me.
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
You forgot the part where you descend form the ceiling suspended by a wire harness and hang upside down while typing into the console.
With that degree of access, there are a million things you could do to gain access to sensitive data. (Eg, rummage throught the filing cabinet, paper is still king; install a physical keylogger dongle; etc, etc.) This would just be the icing on the cake; they're fucked already.