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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."
Seriously, customers require this so IT staff can do remote support and reboot the machine remotely. It is only enabled for one reboot, and you must have cryptographic access to enable this feature. The only threat is if someone where to enable this, not reboot, and then have the machine stolen.
Why does crap like this make it to the front page of Slashdot?
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Also, from his wording, it sounded like it is not enabled by default. In other words, you can actively choose to sacrifice a bit of security in order to make it work properly in your environment. Sounds like a nice feature to me.
How much do you want to bet that "unnamed customers" are synonymous with "various federal and state police agencies, DOD, and NSA"?
Takers?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
The GPG program that you download doesn't do full-disk encryption; it's pretty purely a file/stream encryption program. I suppose you could use it for disk encryption, by streaming data through it on its way to and from a device, but that's not how it's normally used.
There is/was a program around that used GPG to do FDE, called GPGDisk. I'm not sure whether it used your installed copy of GPG to do the heavy lifting, or if it just included the same code, or worked using the same algorithms but had its own totally separate crypto engine. It was reasonably popular for a while, but I think a lot of people who were using it have now switched to TrueCrypt.
However, GPGDisk did offer some unique features, like the ability to encrypt a disk using a GPG key, and some fairly fine-grained access controls that you could set up for multiple users (IIRC). Every once in a while someone will mention it on the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog, so apparently it's still getting some use. But it doesn't offer some of the neater features that TrueCrypt does, like plausible deniability or containers-in-containers, I don't believe.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What, only one referance to Phil Zimmermann? One of the main reasons Philip Zimmermann created Pretty Good Privacy in 1991 was because of the US government wanting to install backdoors in encryption software.