Schneier, UW Team Show Flaw In TrueCrypt Deniability

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier and colleagues from the University of Washington have figured out a way to break the deniability of TrueCrypt 5.1a's hidden files. What about the spanking-new TrueCrypt 6? Schneier says that 'The new version will definitely close some of the leakages, but it's unlikely that it closed all of them.' Meanwhile, PC World is reporting that the problems Schneier and colleagues found are bigger than just TrueCrypt. Among their discoveries: Word auto-saves the contents of encrypted files to the unencrypted portions of your disk, and this problem should apply to all non-full disk encryption software. Their research paper will appear at Usenix HotSec '08."

Comments

Summary is inaccurate

[TheSpoom]

Schneier et al don't break TrueCrypt's deniability, per se. They simply show that Word, Google Desktop, and other automatically-indexing programs may reveal a hidden partition's possible existence.

This is a concern, of course, but can be avoided by careful use of the software invoked when using a TrueCrypt partition (i.e. killing processes except for TrueCrypt, etc).

I believe there's also a portable version of TrueCrypt that can be used that leaves no traces on the OS install once you're finished.