Full Disk Encryption Hard For Law Enforcement To Crack

If you'd rather keep your data private, take heart: disk encryption is a lot harder to break than techno-thriller movies and TV shows make it out to be, to the chagrin of some branches of law enforcement. MrSeb writes with word of a paper titled "The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics" [abstract here to paywalled article] that illustrates just how difficult it is. According to the paper, co-authored by a member of US-CERT, "[T]here are three main problems with full disk encryption (FDE): First, evidence-gathering goons can turn off the computer (for transportation) without realizing it's encrypted, and thus can't get back at the data (unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do); second, if the analysis team doesn't know that the disk is encrypted, it can waste hours trying to read something that's ultimately unreadable; and finally, in the case of hardware-level disk encryption, tampering with the device can trigger self-destruction of the data. The paper does go on to suggest some ways to ameliorate these issues, but ultimately the researchers aren't hopeful: 'Research is needed to develop new techniques and technology for breaking or bypassing full disk encryption.'"

Comments

I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish this was the case in the UK, any encryption keys have to be handed over when asked by the police or .Gov

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[0100010001010011]

So use TrueCrypt and a hidden volume. Give them the keys to your outer volume. It mounts and they can browse your collection of Lolcats. Let them prove that's not what they were looking for.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

If they know it's a truecrypt drive, they probably would suspect that there's another partition so will try and charge you anyway for withholding.

So basically they make your life hell for a year till charges are dropped and would use any little excuse to question & detain you.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[durrr]

I haven't bothered with hidden partitions, yet. Does it mean I'm subject to legal punishment for not using this feature and thus lacking a password to give to law enforcement so they can take part of my extensive collection of crustacean pornography?

And if that, then what happens when truecrypt suddenly accepts multiple hidden partitions or other more complex schemes? Everyone goes to jail because lawmakers somehow ascended beyond full retard?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[jd]

You're forgetting that goggies are in power.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[228e2]

That wont work if they were doing any kind of listening/tapping and see you havent accessed any file on said Lolcat volume since you last set it up 4 months ago. Well, they wont even have to have listening data to figure that out.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[GrandTeddyBearOfDoom]

A straightforward mod would be to have a truecrypt volume concealed in the least significant eight bits of a long 24bit wav file that you could obtain as, e.g. a 1hour+ trance mix from beatport (that would be 16bit, so the data would be inaudible). Slowdown would be tolerable given modern hardware.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It may not help the poor bastard being asked for them; but, depending on the implementation, delivering the keys may simply not be possible.

It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key, so most systems store the key for you and depend on a password, passphrase, and/or some sort of hardware device to grant access to the key. If the system that actually stores the crypto key is designed to resist tampering, there are a reasonable number of initial attempts at forensics that might trip tamper detection and cause the key to be wiped, irrevocably.

Your classier cryptographic coprocessor modules offer such tamper resistance, and the enthusiasm of DRM peddlers and corporate customers who have backups; but really, really, hate data-breach stories will likely continue to push it further down into cheaper and more common business desktops and laptops.

(Even the TPMs of today may be pretty tricky to subvert without pissing them off, though I don't think that they are required to adhere to the same anti-tamper standards as the more serious hardware security modules).

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

"Most of the time I use a live cd to avoid viruses"

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Z00L00K]

You should have some other documents too that aren't illegal but sensitive. (Company secrets or private data like an address book)

And have two hidden volumes in case they wonder you can have one filled with legal MILF porn or something in a way that makes it look like you are keeping it out of sight for a spouse (real or potential).

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[sunderland56]

We need an encryption package that has *two* passwords:

• One normal one that decrypts as usual;
• A second one that formats the disk and installs a standard version of Windows

You use password #1, but if arrested you give up password #2.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[SomePgmr]

Is that true in the US? I always assumed that a person could be otherwise legally compelled to surrender any encryption keys. I know this isn't exactly citing case law, but it sounds like the issue is unsettled:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20078312-281/doj-we-can-force-you-to-decrypt-that-laptop/

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[sco08y]

We need an encryption package that has *two* passwords:

• One normal one that decrypts as usual;
• A second one that formats the disk and installs a standard version of Windows

You use password #1, but if arrested you give up password #2.

That's brilliant, but how do you get the police to use this software? Especially after they've pulled the drive out and plugged it into their forensics kit?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Dogbertius]

Sadly, the notion of "plausible deniability" works both ways. If they (ie: the authorities) are aware it is a TrueCrypt volume, they can just demand you hand over the passwords for the inner and outer volumes. If you provide just one key (ie: the password for the outer volume that contains junk you don't care about), and you are in a country that demonstrates little to no respect for civil rights, they could very well jail you, even if you aren't using a hidden volume.

Secondly, the authorities demanding you hand over the key (strangely enough) isn't covered under fifth amendment rights, so again, they can demand you hand over the keys, or you could be jailed almost indefinitely.

Finally, there are some interesting articles by Bruce Schneier on alternate means of incrimination. www.schneier.com/paper-truecrypt-dfs.pdf

In short, there are many ways to give a judge the idea that the use of a hidden volume is likely (ie: check path histories for previously opened files, check temp folders, etc). Not only would these indicate the possibility of a hidden volume, but some files that were meant to be encrypted may be 100% available (eg: Microsoft Word makes temporary backups of files in your %APPDATA% folders in case it crashes and you want to recover your work; as one example). Unless one is very diligent and knows what he/she is doing with respect to encrypting data, it would seem the only safe method is to encrypt the entire disk and boot off of it exclusively, all while keeping the machine itself disconnected from the internet to avoid hacking attempts, and locked in massive safe so the authorities don't install a keylogger (application or physical device) or start taking snapshots of your disk daily to aid in cracking the password.

You may be able to secure your data, but with multiple means of data accidentally being leaked due to the OS or various applications used in day-to-day life, along with unscrupulous policing agencies allowed to overrule fundamental civil rights, it is likely that one will ultimately lose their data and/or freedom either way.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[ortholattice]

If they know it's a truecrypt drive, they probably would suspect that there's another partition so will try and charge you anyway for withholding.

Then (under protest and with the appearance of great stress) give them the password to the hidden partition, where they'll find some kinky and embarrassing (but not illegal) stuff to keep them busy. At worst they'll think you're a secret crossdressing BDSM fetishist or whatever. What they don't know is inside of that, there is yet another hidden partition.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key

Not really. How hard is to remember a paragraph from your favorite novel or lyrics from a popular song. It's even better if you *mis-remember* the quote/lyrics so that you're the only one who would come up with the result even if someone tried to brute force the key by scanning all your books and listening to all your music.

Perhaps something like:
While the music played you worked by candle light, those San Francisco nights - you were the best in town, Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl, you turned it on the world, that's when you turned the world around

Or maybe:
I was alone I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there. Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there. ooh and I suddenly see you, ooh did I tell you I need you? Every single day of my life.

Try and brute force those keys. Using punctuation makes it even harder. And these are the first verses to well known songs. Use the third verse of an obscure song (one you don't like would be even better). The music makes it much easier to remember and just about anyone can remember songs/lyrics.

Some people just have zero imagination. Sigh!

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[mSparks43]

From the actual paper (worth reading if you have academic access):

Challenges can also arise when a defendant appears to be cooperative. For instance, the defendant may provide incorrect decryption details but the defense may claim that the encrypted container was damaged in some manner, which was why it would not open.

They also list several court cases where truecrypt FDE rendered the machines inaccessible many years after the fact.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[MaskedSlacker]

where they'll find some kinky and embarrassing (but not illegal) stuff to keep them busy. At worst they'll think you're a secret crossdressing BDSM fetishist or whatever

I recommend BDSM furry granny porn. Just so they don't try to claim the 30-something girl in the porn is 17 and falsely charge you with child porn possession just for kicks (it's happened).

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[MaskedSlacker]

See also: stenography. A more effective means would be the least significant bit of each pixel of a high resolution wallpaper image. Plenty of data that can be hidden in there without being noticed.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a great little program that produces random numbers out of the random.data file.
Funny thing is, truecrypt thinks it's a partition...

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[mikael]

These days, the disk controller for the disk drive is logically tied to the hard disk drive platter itself, by an encryption key. If you tried swapping round the controllers to repair the disk drive, that wouldn't work as the encryption keys are different.
You wouldn't even get the disk information sector back.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Doodlesmcpooh]

But it also depends what you have on the encrypted volumes. If it's evidence of tax avoidance then it might be worth giving it up. If you have the plans to the sequel of 9/11 then it's better to do the time for withholding the key.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AK Marc]

They'd be unable to attempt a decrypt without using the software that encrypted it. If they did it right, they'd break the copy, but the original would be able to be used again to make another copy.

How do you think police decrypt something encrypted with a commercial software package?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[sunderland56]

If they leave the drive in the laptop, obviously no issue. It would solve the XKCD lead pipe problem.

If the encryption was in hardware (on the drive controller), also no issue.

*Any* solution will not get around pulling out the hard drive, swapping its controller, and running forensics - but if the key/algorithm is sufficiently strong it would take them a while. The thing is that most computer crime labs try the easy things first - so put in a booby trap at one of the easy steps.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Lehk228]

if you want to deliberately fail that is your choice.

the outer volume should include things like your online banking passwords and some gay porn (if you are not openly gay) and tax records

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[nurb432]

So give them the "password" that erases the drive.. "sorry, i don't know what you people did to my computer".

Or the password to a partition that is of non issue. Like a bunch of Gutenberg books

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[neokushan]

Truecrypt does offer a hidden OS partition, that would operate entirely independently of the "main" OS. This would mean that no document history would appear or anything like that, but it also requires that you use both OS's occasionally to keep up the illusion. I use Truecrypt myself, but I don't use a hidden partition because frankly I'm not doing anything that illegal and it's a lot of hassle to do this.

I do wonder if it's possible to access one partition while actively using the other? Or better yet, use something like VMware to "run" the second OS while inside the first?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[fluffy99]

Unfortunately, it's not difficult to look at the OS for evidence that the hidden partition exists. Even if they don't realize its a truecrypt hidden volume, they might start asking for usb drives that you haven't turned over.

www.schneier.com/paper-truecrypt-dfs.pdf

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Any evidence to back this up, or are you just spewing bullshit?

Yes, I do use full disk encryption. Yes, I am paranoid. Yes, I think the TSA is a crock of shit. However, we look like, and become, retarded fucktards when we make irrational shit up.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[theedgeofoblivious]

Or what?

They'll prosecute you for not giving them your password?

If they had enough evidence that they were able to get a search warrant to get the data on your computer, you were probably already about to be prosecuted for something pretty substantial.

If you had a choice between being prosecuted for not giving them your password or being prosecuted for whatever else you were about to be prosecuted for, I expect that in most cases you'd want to be prosecuted for not giving them your password.

The government can threaten you with an alternative prosecution, but they can never actually compel you to give up your password.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Teun]

It's about time some Brit went to the European Court of Human Rights, according to most legal opinion you don't have to incriminate yourself.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

"If they know it's a truecrypt drive, they probably would suspect that there's another partition.."

Then create half a dozen hidden partitions.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[tantaliz3]

Well then...the only solution seems to be to abolish self-interested governments the world over and replace them with a truly transparent public run system where everyone gets a tablet or phone to vote with that also stores the vote info locally. That way, the vote is transmitted and counted and can be recounted and confirmed by querying the devices again.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[xkr]

Uh, I forget.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[mr100percent]

In the US, you have the right to remain silent. Fifth Amendment gives you protection against self-incrimination, so supposedly if you refuse to hand over the key the court isn't supposed to assume it means you're guilty.

Of course, the Bush administration did threaten people like John Walker Lindh or the Lackawanna Six with being sent to Guantanamo indefinitely if they didn't plead guilty, so we're not exactly in great legal territory.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

If they leave the drive in the laptop, obviously no issue. It would solve the XKCD lead pipe problem.

Five dollar wrench. Not lead pipe.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[leromarinvit]

It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key

Not really. How hard is to remember a paragraph from your favorite novel or lyrics from a popular song. It's even better if you *mis-remember* the quote/lyrics so that you're the only one who would come up with the result even if someone tried to brute force the key by scanning all your books and listening to all your music.

I was going to comment that this doesn't make a good key because human languages have so much redundancy and therefore rather little entropy per word, but then I actually checked and came to the opposite conclusion: While an n-bit paragraph wouldn't make a good n-bit key, a much longer paragraph actually does. If we assume 7-8 bits of entropy per word (a number a quick Google search turned up), then your examples would all make for very good 256-bit keys.

The only disadvantage is that such a long passphrase is quite annoying if you have to type it often, and it's hard to type correctly at speed if you can't see what you've written on the screen.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly how TrueCrypt 6.0 works.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're stupid.

Those that control the voting tablets control the country.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Jeremi]

Hmm, maybe keep your hidden partition off of the computer entirely, e.g. on a "Hello Kitty" USB stick that you keep in a secure location.

(I'm imagining going a step further and embedding said secure storage device inside the wall of your computer room, and communicating with it via bluetooth or Wi-Fi only.... but maybe that's getting to clever for my own good ;^) )

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[bbn]

*Any* solution will not get around pulling out the hard drive, swapping its controller, and running forensics - but if the key/algorithm is sufficiently strong it would take them a while

That is why part of the key needs to be stored in the controller (or any other external to the actual disk). Store part of the key in a tamper resistant chip. If the chip is lost, or if the chip activates its self destruct protocols, the actual 256 bit AES key is lost for ever.

If you are suggesting that they might try to brute force data encrypted with something like 256 bit AES (or even 128 bit) - well that wont be any of your concern. You will be long gone before they succeed in that. No matter who "they" are.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[MagicM]

It's even better if you *mis-remember* the quote/lyrics

Who knew that kissthisguy.com would become the #1 password dictionary.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[MagicM]

You sound like someone who hasn't seen this yet, but would enjoy it.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Dogbertius]

You make a very good point.

With respect to your question, no; one cannot use two virtual OSes on a single drive concurrently.

Not to be critical, but I think people should avoid the "I'm not doing anything illegal" statement, because there are plenty of legitimate reasons for encrypting personal data. Maybe the RIAA/MPAA serve their "John Doe" lawsuit papers to force a settlement because they have enough money to drown me in legal fees because someone on my subnet was downloading torrents, and the MPAA/RIAA lacks the ability to distinguish users since we share a common gateway. I don't download MP3's illegally, yet the RIAA/MPAA is legally (yet unjustly) allowed to bully me into paying them, despite my not having done anything at all wrong or illegal. Maybe I have some intimate pictures of my girlfriend on the hard drive they demand. Nothing wrong with that (please, to all cynical readers, leave your baggage and immoral, deontological excuse for ethics, at the door), but I fail to see why they should be privy to that information.

This is a serious, legit, real-world example.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Dogbertius]

If it is broadcasting or in discoverable BT mode, no point; it will be found with simple sniffer tools.

I would agree though, that if the physical medium were secured, it would be a good strategy. Until they start punching holes in the wall, when they notice a WIFI accessible NAS device, though.

When one crosses the border to the USA from Canada, the US has a policy in place where they can tear the car to shreds on suspicion of drugs, and leave it that way. They don't even have to fix it or put it back together either, and one has no legal recourse. No wonder I haven't visited the country (despite some of my favorite bars being there) since the 90's. If they can go that far, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine the authorities ripping holes in the wall and tearing apart beds, couches, the ceiling, etc.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Secondly, the authorities demanding you hand over the key (strangely enough) isn't covered under fifth amendment rights, so again, they can demand you hand over the keys, or you could be jailed almost indefinitely.

Passwords and encryption keys are covered by the Fifth Amendment. You cannot be compelled to testify against yourself, same as how it is already settled case law that you cannot be compelled to hand over the combination to a safe.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[CharlieG]

Just remember, they make a copy FIRST, and they work on the COPY - they don't work on the actual drive - so you just erased the copy, NOW they go to the judge with the info you provided a false password...

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[tsotha]

Cops aren't that stupid. The first thing they do when they get your drive is copy it, and all the tinkering gets done on the copy.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[DamnStupidElf]

It's obviously foolish to use public text verbatim as a key. Common Crawl has a 40 TB dataset that costs approximately $150 to MapReduce on EC2. Any key that happens to be a (reasonably short, say under 1KB) substring of that data costs $150 to break. Any key within a short hamming distance of a substring in that database costs roughly 2^hamming_distance more to break; two changed bytes is only worth $600. I imagine that large organizations who care have much larger databases including the text of most published books. It's such an obvious idea and until you realize that attackers have access to all the public source data that you do it sounds like a good idea to just pick a random string from a book to use as a passphrase. Don't kid yourself; no matter how obscure or unpopular a song is there will be lyrics for it somewhere on the Internet, not to mention in published books.

You can take a published string and make it a reasonably secure passphrase by adding enough entropy to it, but you still have to remember the entropy that you've added. Why not just start with a diceware passphrase and memorize the entropy directly?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Jeremi]

If it is broadcasting or in discoverable BT mode, no point; it will be found with simple sniffer tools.

Agreed; it would need to be completely passive until activated by a broadcast of the appropriate activation code (which would be based on your password, salted to avoid replay attacks, disguised as normal WiFi/bluetooth traffic, etc)

If they can go that far, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine the authorities ripping holes in the wall and tearing apart beds, couches, the ceiling, etc.

Very true, if they suspect that such a device exists. The hope is that they would think that by grabbing your computer they already have everything there is to grab, and wouldn't think to look elsewhere (in the walls, in the ceiling, in the plumbing, buried under the bench in the park where you sometimes bring your laptop to "check your email" on sunny days, etc)

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[mysidia]

same as how it is already settled case law that you cannot be compelled to hand over the combination to a safe.

However, authorities can get a warrant to search your safe, and if you refuse to hand over the combination, they can drill the lock.

Authorities have ways of figuring out your encryption keys besides forcing you to divulage them, as well.

Techniques such as capturing your keys or access methods through surveillance; cold boot attacks, where the RAM is quickly cooled, ejected from your computer, and then analyzed using dedicated hardware, to extract keys or plaintext from your RAM for key cracking.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[mysidia]

If the system that actually stores the crypto key is designed to resist tampering, there are a reasonable number of initial attempts at forensics that might trip tamper detection and cause the key to be wiped, irrevocably.

This is a potential approach... utilize hardware based crypto with tamper-resistant hardware modules.

When someone tries to coerce you to get the key, you hand over the hardware module, which contains authentication credentials that can be used to obtain the key when the right PIN number is entered.

However, the actual key is stored solely in the cloud, a remote cloud server that the HSM will connect to in order to decode the key, and the HSM/hardware security module has the key to decrypt a response from the cloud server to access the true key.

The tamper-resistant crypto hardware security module contains a GPS for verifying location a fingerprint and retina scanner for verifying authentication, in addition to the PIN code. In other words.... you can even give out the PIN code, if the unit is in the wrong place, or the operator does not have the proper biometrics, authentication will fail, and the HSM will contact the cloud server as if it was about to obtain the key, but instead instruct the cloud server to purge the key from RAM, and the HSM will then self-destruct.

If you don't check in by authenticating at least once every X days, the cloud-based authentication server shuts down the HSM's access to the keys by purging the encrypted version of the keys from RAM, and you have a number of "trusted third parties" who have the sole ability to re-instate the cloud service required for the HSM to authenticate, but only when they cooperate with you, and they have special instructions only to cooperate if authorized by a legal representative.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[dissy]

It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key

Not really. How hard is to remember a paragraph from your favorite novel or lyrics from a popular song.

That is not a key, that is a pass-phrase.

A key is a "random" file with 16k-bytes of numbers. It is only not random when compared to another 16k-byte file that is it's key-pair.

The pass-phrase protects the key file, but things are encrypted with the key, not the pass-phrase.

If you destroy the key, which is the only thing protected with the pass-phrase, then none of the files can ever be recovered.
This is what the GP is speaking of.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better shift your fingers over one key and type the same phrase.

Example:

this is a passwordphrase mistyped on the keyboard.
yjod od s [sddeptf[jtsdr ,odyu[rf pm yjr lrunsptf/

Much much harder to brute force but still easily remembered.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Tolleman]

What if you forgot the key?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[cdrpsab]

We need an encryption package that has *two* passwords:

• One normal one that decrypts as usual;
• A second one that formats the disk and installs a standard version of Windows

You use password #1, but if arrested you give up password #2.

Actually, that's called a duress code.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[vux984]

The only disadvantage is that such a long passphrase is quite annoying

Or you have to enter it in on a phone. And i don't want to ever have to do that on a phone.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[cheekyjohnson]

but I don't use a hidden partition because frankly I'm not doing anything that illegal

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? That's not always true. You might even use it against actual criminals.

I do agree that it is a hassle, though.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Chris Mattern]

They'd be unable to attempt a decrypt without using the software that encrypted it

Wrong. The idea that the encryption *algorithm* is resistant to analysis is one of the most common mistakes beginners in encryption make. Only the key makes the encryption hard to break.

How do you think police decrypt something encrypted with a commercial software package?

With the commercial software package--because they can trust it. That means it's not worth the trouble to reverse-engineer it. With your home-brewed, booby-trapped software that they don't trust at all? They'll take the trouble, assuming that they care that much about what's on the disk.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Restil]

What you need is a red herring partition that contains a lot of sensitive but not illegal information. Fill it up with a lot of documents on various radical protests or government conspiracies... the thing that paranoid lunatics would see fit to hide behind strong encryption. Hopefully the authorities will be convinced that this is the "illegal" information you were trying to hide and ignore any other possibilities.

-Restil

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course that would mean that the individuals in physical possession of the tablets would actually be in charge of the country and apparently actually having to listen to and obey the will of to the majority of the citizens is a bad idea. At least according to SOME people.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[networkBoy]

As I understand it, the fifth amendment does not apply if you've written the key down, if it is only in your mind then you should be fine, and failing that you can forget the key.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AK Marc]

Wrong. The idea that the encryption *algorithm* is resistant to analysis is one of the most common mistakes beginners in encryption make. Only the key makes the encryption hard to break.

So, how would the police go about decrypting my drive encrypted with a commercial program with the key of 1234? Because, from my experience dealing with police and FBI computer forensics, they'd use the same program and type in "1234" like they were a user. Perhaps the NSA would just look at the screen and no longer see the code, but see "blonde, brunette" without seeing the code, but those actually doing the work in the vast majority of cases would use the program as loaded on the disk.

You made the beginner mistake of confusing what they "could" do with what they "do" do.

With the commercial software package--because they can trust it. That means it's not worth the trouble to reverse-engineer it. With your home-brewed, booby-trapped software that they don't trust at all? They'll take the trouble,

No, they don't. They make a certified copy, then try your boobytrapped software. When that fails, they make another certified copy, and try something else. They *will*, in all cases, try your home-brewed booby-trapped software.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Dahamma]

I would sooner spend my life in prison than type those entire phrases every time I turned on my computer.

Though that's another story - worrying about the government accessing my computer is for conspiracy theorists; I am fine with securing it from someone stealing my computer, which makes the whole "demand keys" argument irrelevant.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably isn't as hard as you make it out to be to secure your data form the authorities. You can solve the word problem using "freeze" type programs where nothing changes on the disk unless in an unfrozen state. If you listen to the lawyer and shut the fuck up when questioned the police can't (in most cases- UK and other less civilised countries being the exception) get access to your data with or without a hidden volume. Even in the UK the penalties for failing to reveal your password (or otherwise being unable to) are significantly less severe in many if not most cases than a conviction for a crime in which they are going after you for. I don't care if we are talking about drugs, prostitution, or children. Chances are you are going to get more than 2 years or they wouldn't even be bothering with you.

Then you have to ask about key loggers and similar. They will need to suspect the use of disk encryption first. If you know your stuff they won't have gotten this far. Law enforcement agencies have limited resources so they aren't using sneak and peak warrants on every one. It may be almost insurmountable to go up against law enforcement in practice still. However the resources they have to use against you are limited.

If you have any brains then you won't end up under investigation in the first place as you will be less vulnerable than other criminals. Law enforcement goes after the easy targets. The harder a target you make of yourself the less likely they will succeed in unravelling your criminal activities. Even without disk encryption many career criminals understand the limitations of law enforcement. Sticking to the same crime will make you a priority. Diversification will reduce the risk of being caught or investigated as they look at dollars. Multiple frauds of a smallish nature will go uninvestigated. For instance if I'm in a con to get trailer park owners to give up there property and use fraud against the government to get these owners financing it could take significant resources to investigate. Especially when I keep no records. It is unlikely they will unravel more than 1-3% of the fraud. Then consider you actually have to do multi-million dollar frauds to even get the attention of law enforcement. Keeping the fraud under 1.5 million should suffice. Stop. Rinse. Start a new. You can't keep doing the same fraud of course.

If a stupid teenager who doesn't understand how to protect themselves (uses bare minimum of knowledge and Tor) can delay the discovery of themselves an entire week in a highly visible investigation certainly a more sophisticated career criminal can delay an investigation indefinitely.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Let them prove that's not what they were looking for.

Rubber hose will do that quite handily. They'll vigorously apply the rubber hose to your body until you divulge the existence of the hidden volume and access keys. If you do not have a hidden volume then it sucks to be you because they'll simply continue to apply the rubber hose.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, if you'd rather not waste time searching for or writing this stuff: midget porn. It's legal, but embarrassing enough to be a plausible candidate for encryption.
Business or personal documentation also works.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

How 'bout creating honey pots or throwaway sectors. Basically create one hidden sector that you give away to keep the rest hidden.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Runaway1956]

Luckily for me, I'm an American. "I invoke my rights under the fifth amendment, and refuse to offer self incriminating evidence, thank you very much!"

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are vastly underestimating the cost to brute force a pass phrase!

You need to test every substring with an expensive process: perform the (salted, multi-round) substring->key conversion, attempt to decrypt one or more cipher blocks, and decide if the result is correct plaintext... a well-designed FDE system will not make this an easy task, and you have to repeat it an awful lot of times to brute force the passphrase.

A 40 TB corpus has approximately 4 x 10^16 substrings of less than 1K, or 4 x 10^15 if we assume strings start on word boundaries and an average word length of 10 or less. Even if you charitably assume the whole hash/decrypt/validate process can be done in 1 ms of compute time per candidate, thats 4 x 10^13 seconds (about 1M years) of compute time. Unless Amazon has drastically lowered their prices, I don't think you'll be getting that for $150...

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Grishnakh]

You could also use the first stanza of the Golden Girls theme song that someone keeps posting here lately:

Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true you're a pal and a cosmonaut

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Grishnakh]

Exactly: it's pretty hard to find lead pipes these days. I don't think they're even made any more. You could use a galvanized steel pipe though.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[jbolden]

That wouldn't work for the reasons discussed below. But there are drive electronics that respond to tampering by wiping. That already exists.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[flargleblarg]

steganography, not stenography

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Bengie]

They have SSD harddrives that are encrypted with randomly generated AES-256 keys. If it detects the controller is not the same, it will wipe the key, if you enter in a password incorrectly too many times, it will wipe the key.

Forensics removes your HD, plugs it into their machine, turns it on.. BAM.. all the data is effectively gone.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Killer99]

so how exactly will they get these keys? brain washing? I am sure that your brain is off limits to their sticky little hands.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[WorBlux]

For criminal cases you can in under no circumstance be required to testify, unless you have already testified and thus opened yourself up to a cross-examination. In a civil case you can be ordered to produce evidence and may be held in contempt if you don't. In addition failure in a civil case to reveal certain data or documents when ordered to do so, it will likely be construed against you without a solid reason as to why the data is not forthcoming.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

That's assuming the storage device lets them copy the data without the correct password. We use USB flash drives that encrypt anything stored on them with a random AES key stored in the cryptoprocessor inside the drive, in addition to any encryption done by the OS (usually another round of AES with a password-derived key). If you send it too many incorrect passwords (or just one specifically chosen fake password) it will destroy the key. The enclosure is shielded against SEM and if you try to open it the cryptoprocessor will be destroyed. Then the only way to get to the data is to crack the random AES key (not happening) regardless of whether you know the passwords or not. And no, this is not some CIA-only stuff, those drives, while a bit pricey, can be purchased by anybody.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[guruevi]

You would need a full stack (kernel etc.) that understands this but you could devise a partitioning/container scheme where the encrypted data interleaves with 'fake' data so that the only way to know if there is a hidden partition is to do a low-level read of the whole thing. In combination with hardware-level full disk encryption this may be made totally impossible.

I think you may be able to do this with a variation on ZFS - create 2 ZFS filesystems in a pool, one that is encrypted and hidden and the other encrypted and visible. The encryption keys contain the disk labels and it's file table etc. first encryption key is a dud and can only encrypt the first part and contains the layout on the first partition but not the second, the second encryption key can unlock both and also contains the information (layout etc) on both filesystems. Attempting to use the first (dud) encryption key results in the inadvertent overwriting of portions of the second partition because it's unaware of the second partition in it's own free spaces.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps something like:...

Or maybe:..

Those examples suck! I use:

Baby, baby, baby, oh
Like baby, baby, baby, no
Like baby, baby, baby, oh
I thought you'd always be mine, mine

I'm all gone
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)
Now I'm all gone
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)
Now I'm all gone
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)
Now I'm all gone, gone, gone, gone
I'm gone

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they don't. They make a certified copy, then try your boobytrapped software. When that fails, they make another certified copy, and try something else. They *will*, in all cases, try your home-brewed booby-trapped software.

I have about 100 old hard discs (250GB) at home as well as about 8 ( 2TB ) in a hardware based raid, how would they approach this problem ?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Tatarize]

If the key is written down and they find it, that's evidence. If it's not then you apparently according to the Supreme Court you still don't have a 5th amendment right there. You have to have forgot it, or never knew it to begin with. Or perhaps claim a 5th amendment right to not incriminate yourself by knowing the actual password itself (which could be successful but I've never heard of anybody having argued that). Frankly, if you have the password to somebody elses system and it has illegal data, then the fact that you know the password, in and of itself, is an admission to some compliance or trust between you and certain parties. As such, one should necessarily have a 5th amendment right to the password itself if not to the data concealed by the password.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obviously foolish to use public text verbatim as a key. Common Crawl has a 40 TB dataset that costs approximately $150 to MapReduce on EC2. Any key that happens to be a (reasonably short, say under 1KB) substring of that data costs $150 to break. Any key within a short hamming distance of a substring in that database costs roughly 2^hamming_distance more to break; two changed bytes is only worth $600. I imagine that large organizations who care have much larger databases including the text of most published books. It's such an obvious idea and until you realize that attackers have access to all the public source data that you do it sounds like a good idea to just pick a random string from a book to use as a passphrase. Don't kid yourself; no matter how obscure or unpopular a song is there will be lyrics for it somewhere on the Internet, not to mention in published books.

You can take a published string and make it a reasonably secure passphrase by adding enough entropy to it, but you still have to remember the entropy that you've added. Why not just start with a diceware passphrase and memorize the entropy directly?

Because it's easier to remember something like
"Four score and seven years ago, the only thing we had to Fear was Fear itself. And in this hole, there lived a Hobbit. Live long, and prosper."

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AK Marc]

I have about 100 old hard discs (250GB) at home as well as about 8 ( 2TB ) in a hardware based raid, how would they approach this problem ?

Depends on what they are looking for. In many cases, if they don't think they'll make the case they want, they'll approach it by throwing it in evidence for the next 100 years just so you don't have it. Otherwise, they will check them all, one at a time, after having bitcopied them (and no, doesn't need to match your drive size, as long as the receiving drive is larger). For the RAID one, they'd copy all the drives, then hook it up to similar hardware (or possibly back into yours with the copied disks, if nothing else worked). 100 drives isn't hard, it's just a lot of time. Maybe they'd better spend their time investigating your associates.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[zmooc]

Just make sure they destroy the "only" copy of the key while searching your home. Problem solved.

A friend of mine had his key stored on his cell phone. When he was arrested for copyright bullshit, the police tossed all his belongings in a box rather roughly. The phone died in the process and it took most of the evidence - encrypted on his harddrive - with it :P

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want security, what the hell are you doing using anything from Microsoft?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[DrXym]

That's fair enough but you'd probably have to be sure not to leave other traces of your activity around, e.g. registry entries pointing at non-existent files on the mount point. Everything would have to be self contained. Just as important your shadow copy would have to be consistent with the known facts. e.g. if the cops know you were logged onto the internet on such and such a date and your shadow copy hasn't been used in 2 years they're going start threatening you with RIPA.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[petes_PoV]

Or what?
They'll prosecute you for not giving them your password?

Exactly right - though I've never heard of any such prosecutions being made, or what the punishment is.

More interesting is how law enforcement would react to a large block of random data that appeared on a drive. It would not be much of a stretch to imagine that they would assume any data they didn't recognise was "encrypted data" and therefore require you to tell/show them how to gain access to it. If the data was, genuinely random (dd if=/dev/random of=/my/file) there is no possibility of decrypting it - but also no possibility of them being able to prove that it *is* encrypted.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Joce640k]

They also list several court cases where truecrypt FDE rendered the machines inaccessible many years after the fact.

...and why wouldn't it? The bit I don't get is why this is surprising to anybody.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Joce640k]

They don't have to find you "guilty" to keep you locked up for a very long time...

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[darkmeridian]

Yep. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, but doesn't protect against the seizure of documents. In one memorable case, the defendant in a crime was asked to submit to photos of his full body neo Nazi tattoos to show that the murder was based on racial animus. He objected on the basis of the Fifth Amendment, but the court said no way.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

True story:
they place the hd in a cloning device.

if it doesn't work(too many bad sectors that can't be read that make the controller just stop), they'll send it to a data recovery company.

at their expense(at least when they can't find anything they wanted on it).

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[allo]

you know, they work on an image? First they make an image. Then they try to break it. if the software changes the image to a clean winxp, you get into trouble until you tell them how to decrypt it the correct way. and because of the image, they have infinite tries.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[gl4ss]

you know how often that's actually employed? 1/10000th of times. probably only if you've already been on the headlines for major newspapers several times.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[igb]

That isn't quite the case. If a disk drive is seized under a search warrant or data is intercepted under a content interception warrant, then it's an offence not to hand over the keys when asked (although there are a set of defences which might hold: it isn't a strict liability offence). But the police can't ask you for the keys at their own initiative (search warrants require a court order, content interception warrants are rare beasts and require the Home Secretary's personal signature to an application) and the government can't (because they aren't the courts, and the Home Secretary is acting in his role as minister of state, not as a member of the government).

But the case of interception warrants issued by the Home Secretary is a slight side-show, as I'm not aware of any notices to produce keys for intercept product, and in practice it would be pointless to make such an order. There may be someone out there somewhere using a protocol which doesn't offer Perfect Forward Secrecy (for example, statically-keyed IPSec) but the vast majority of encryption protocols likely to be used over a network cannot be decrypted even by someone who retrospectively obtains all the static keys.

There have been notices to produce keys for disks that have been seized under search warrants, and there's a legitimate debate to be had about that. However, unless you're about fifteen and believe that sticking it to the man is a victimless crime and the police are all fascists, yah, the general contention that the courts of the land can issue search warrants and then demand that the product of that search be rendered intelligible does not seem unreasonable, nor is there the slightest evidence that the power is being over-used (about half a dozen cases in the past ten years, I believe). Moreover, the legislation quite carefully allows you to disclose session keys, rather than long-term keys, and quite carefully excludes any power to demand long-term keys.

There's a lot wrong with RIPA 2000, and a lot of the debates both at the time and more recently needed to be had. But claiming it gives the police or, worse, the government the power to seize keys (by implication long-term keys) is both untrue and unhelpful.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[sergueyz]

In the defense of original idea, I should note that you can combine paragraphs or sentences by theme or feeling. Combining only two sentences from 5TB data will render brute force attack useless.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[rant64]

Especially after they've pulled the drive out and plugged a copy of it into their forensics kit?

FTFY.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[JoeMerchant]

So basically they make your life hell for a year till charges are dropped and would use any little excuse to question & detain you.

Yep, the most important lesson taught to me in High School was: if you piss off "the man," it doesn't matter if you break any rules or not, he's "the man," and he and his buddies are going to teach you a lesson, regardless.

Luckily, "the man" I pissed off was just an ex-coach English teacher (who just married an 18 year old ex-student of his), his powers seemed to be limited to a one-day in-school suspension, any more than that and he ran the risk of making it worth my (and my parent's) time to call attention to the administration's total lack of basis for the punishment they were handing out.

Local and national police have a little more range of actions they can take against the common man without putting themselves at risk, at least compared to a sad old high school English teacher.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Dr_Barnowl]

You and I understand it, but the popular image* is that encryption is that something that is trivially broken.

The Allies were very lucky that the state of the art was so primitive at the time of WWII, and that the digital computer had not been invented. Even then, they had to devote significant resources, manpower, and intelligence to the production line of breaking Axis encryption. The advances made then contributed significantly to later advances in Information Technology.

The image that people focus on is that that the encryption was broken. Since then, information technology has improved greatly, so the ability to break encryption must have improved greatly, yes?

They forget that breaking the encryption was a gargantuan task compared to the task of encrypting the messages themselves - the encryption was done by basic troops with a portable hand-operated clockwork lightbox, the decryption took large banks of electromechanical equipment and a fair number of geniuses.

Now many of us carry a computer that makes the combined computing power of Bletchley Park look like a toy abacus.

* I'm not talking about the _popular_, popular image, foisted on us by movies like Swordfish. Believe me, if simultaneously having a gun held to your head and receiving a blowjob improved your programming ability to the point where you could break 128-bit encryption in less than a minute, there would be a HELL of a lot of employment opportunities in the thug / fluffer department at most successful software firms.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

I was going to comment that this doesn't make a good key because human languages have so much redundancy and therefore rather little entropy per word, but then I actually checked and came to the opposite conclusion: While an n-bit paragraph wouldn't make a good n-bit key, a much longer paragraph actually does. If we assume 7-8 bits of entropy per word (a number a quick Google search turned up), then your examples would all make for very good 256-bit keys.

The only disadvantage is that such a long passphrase is quite annoying if you have to type it often, and it's hard to type correctly at speed if you can't see what you've written on the screen.

Agreed. It's a pain in the ass to type such a long passphrase. *However* If you want to keep your cocaine sales records or your child porn safe, I expect that it would be worth it.

My point was in relation to the OP who made the incredibly stupid claim that long passphrases are hard to remember.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

The only disadvantage is that such a long passphrase is quite annoying

Or you have to enter it in on a phone. And i don't want to ever have to do that on a phone.

Then don't put stuff that would require such measures on your phone. Why would you do so anyway? If someone gains physical control over your mobile device, even incredibly long passphrases become crackable. Especially if the government or police have physical control of said device. They will (presumably) exist for the centuries it would take to crack long passphrases.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

It's even better if you *mis-remember* the quote/lyrics

Who knew that kissthisguy.com would become the #1 password dictionary.

that's exactly the kind of stuff I was talking about. You know what you *think* the lyrics are and once you add punctuation and some deliberate mistakes, even plain language crackers will have an awful time of it.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

It's obviously foolish to use public text verbatim as a key. Common Crawl has a 40 TB dataset that costs approximately $150 to MapReduce on EC2. Any key that happens to be a (reasonably short, say under 1KB) substring of that data costs $150 to break. Any key within a short hamming distance of a substring in that database costs roughly 2^hamming_distance more to break; two changed bytes is only worth $600. I imagine that large organizations who care have much larger databases including the text of most published books. It's such an obvious idea and until you realize that attackers have access to all the public source data that you do it sounds like a good idea to just pick a random string from a book to use as a passphrase. Don't kid yourself; no matter how obscure or unpopular a song is there will be lyrics for it somewhere on the Internet, not to mention in published books. You can take a published string and make it a reasonably secure passphrase by adding enough entropy to it, but you still have to remember the entropy that you've added. Why not just start with a diceware passphrase and memorize the entropy directly?

I guess reading comprehension isn't your strong suit. I'll assume that you are an ESL person rather than a moron. I said:

...It's even better if you *mis-remember* the quote/lyrics so that you're the only one who would come up with the result even if someone tried to brute force the key by scanning all your books and listening to all your music.

Get it now?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key

Not really. How hard is to remember a paragraph from your favorite novel or lyrics from a popular song.

That is not a key, that is a pass-phrase.

A key is a "random" file with 16k-bytes of numbers. It is only not random when compared to another 16k-byte file that is it's key-pair.

The pass-phrase protects the key file, but things are encrypted with the key, not the pass-phrase.

If you destroy the key, which is the only thing protected with the pass-phrase, then none of the files can ever be recovered. This is what the GP is speaking of.

The GP is correct that keys are damn near impossible to commit to memory. It's so difficult, I don't see why anyone would try -- rather just create an extremely long passphrase to encrypt the key. That said, one *could* use song lyrics and such directly as an encryption key, making my point valid, as long as the software you use allows it.

A minor point -- Crypto keys are, "In encryption, a key specifies the particular transformation of plaintext into ciphertext, or vice versa during decryption." I'm not sure where in the definition that a key is either "random" or "16k-bytes of numbers." Perhaps you could show me the part I missed.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AmiMoJo]

I have a question about this. Say the police accuse you of being a paedophile and it takes a year or two to resolve. During that time you will probably lose your job and most of your friends. What happens when you are released without charge or found innocent at a trial? Can you get your old job back? Is there any compensation of lost earnings, businesses that failed, money spent on defence?

The fall-out from the bungled Operation Ore was immense and lead to the suicides of innocent people, but no action was taken against the incompetent officers behind it. They failed to do even basic investigatory work and it seems like they can just destroy your life with no oversight or help for the wrongly accused. What is even more worrying is that when the police are investigating non-sexual offences and are in danger of looking bad they often throw in some random child porn charges, e.g. that time they raided the wrong house and accidentally shot one of the occupants on anti-terror intelligence.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AmiMoJo]

Truecrypt could use an "erase key" feature for wiping hard drives with random data. If you do a normal format it zeros everything, but if you overwrite with random data there is no way to tell if it is just random noise or an encrypted volume. Of course you don't have to use Truecrypt to do that but it would help provide plausible deniability if it was included as a feature.

Personally I wipe encrypted drives by simply re-formatting them with Truecrypt and using a random password and random keyfile that I then delete immediately. Saves time by not erasing the whole drive and unlike doing a normal Quick Format you can be sure that the header containing the volume key has been overwritten.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[CohibaVancouver]

Truecrypt could use an "erase key" feature for wiping hard drives with random data.

The new self-encrypting hard drives (that adhere to the OPAL standard) have this feature. One software command shreds the key - In effect wiping the drive back to factory spec.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Indefinite contempt of court:

http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[cb88]

Watson is watching....

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Bungleigh]

Don't kid yourself; no matter how obscure or unpopular a song is there will be lyrics for it somewhere on the Internet, not to mention in published books.

Do you have any idea just how much (terrible) original music is available on myspace?

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an oil cartel lobbyist maybe? :P

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AmiMoJo]

No no no, the FIRST thing they do is take the drive out and image it using their forensics software and a special read-only SATA/IDE controller. If you somehow modified the drive's firmware to erase some data you might be able to get away with it, but questions would be asked as to why you didn't warn the police about it and instead waited for it to destroy potential evidence.

You could perhaps keep a floppy drive attached to your PC with a disk in it. The disk would have some corrupt data on it which you could claim was used as a keyfile. Once destroyed there would be no way to recover the data. The hard part would be damaging the disk in a way that looks like the police might have done it accidentally, e.g. ejecting it during a write operation. Magnets and the like might leave evidence of tampering.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AmiMoJo]

That has been tried but it didn't work. Apparently the password itself is not protected by that convention. They seem to view it as like the combination to a safe or the key to a room, something physical which you must hand over to let the police do their investigation. Failure to do so obstructs justice.

Interesting RIPA says that you can provide decrypted copies of files rather than the key itself. Quite how the police would know that the files you provided are the real ones is not clear.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[vux984]

Then don't put stuff that would require such measures on your phone. Why would you do so anyway?

My phone accesses many of the same resources my desktop does. Virtually all the online services I use, VPNs, and wireless access points I use,... hell I even remote to my own desktop from my phone.

To be honest, other than a BIOS boot password on my desktop PC, I'm hard pressed to think of a password I'd never have to enter on my phone...

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[LingNoi]

In the UK we use an exclusion based process to finding suspects. What the means is the police gather evidence to disprove someone committed a crime rather then build a case around someone. If you're being arrested then it's most likely too late and anything handed over on a hard disk will probably be the last piece of the puzzle rather then the first.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[InspectorGadget1964]

You could say "I can't remember..."

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[F1re]

Don't try that in Australia. BDSM porn is illegal in Australia.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[AmiMoJo]

In the UK things are a bit different. You have the right to remain silent, but if you later say something that you come to rely on in court the jury is allowed to take into account that fact that you didn't mention it right away. Additionally passwords are not protected by the right to remain silent and can lead to a maximum of two years jail time.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[hesaigo999ca]

>If they know it's a truecrypt drive, they probably would suspect that there's another partition so will try and charge you anyway for withholding.
you can have dual encrypted drives....give them the password to the first which is a bogus, and then let them think the thing spans the rest of the disk....

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[xenobyte]

Actually USB drives is the key to plausible deniability here. Assuming you have turned off all the stuff that leaves plaintext copies all over your regular disks, all that remains are clues that a disk might have been attached. Just claim that it was a USB drive that you must have forgotten on the plane. That would be both plausible and reasonable, plus it's likely that airplane cleaning staff (overworked, underpaid) steal easily concealable items like this. As the plane most likely already have departed with new passengers etc. it's pretty unlikely that a real forgotten USB drive would have found by someone honest enough to turn it in.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Whorhay]

I could be confused but I think I currently have a setup similiar to this.

My main OS is windows with a number of hard drives. On one of those drives I have a large file mixed with other large files, that is mislabeled to match the other files. This file is actually a True Crypt container, which has a Virtualbox unix OS installed on it.

Hopefully because the virtual machine is entirely encapsulated within the TC container nothing would leak out into the top level windows environment. The only obvious flaw that I can see is that the virtual machine talks to the network through the hosts connection. Although I suppose you don't absolutely have to have a net connection for some uses. And I'm not using a hidden partition, I've just camo'd the container.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

Then don't put stuff that would require such measures on your phone. Why would you do so anyway?

My phone accesses many of the same resources my desktop does. Virtually all the online services I use, VPNs, and wireless access points I use,... hell I even remote to my own desktop from my phone.

To be honest, other than a BIOS boot password on my desktop PC, I'm hard pressed to think of a password I'd never have to enter on my phone...

The discussion is about law enforcement whining about cracking encryption, not how to compromise your own security. I guess law enforcement in your area will have no problem discovering whatever it is that will put you in PMITA prison.

Good luck using your phone to log into your desktop from jail. I guess we'll be hearing from you again when you get out.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

It most likely does not concern you but I'm no conspiracy theorist and I've had my HD and disks confiscated and searched by police - and while them not finding anything was mostly because of incompetency I wont be giving them a 2nd chance to discover the type of data they were looking for.
Was I doing something illegal? Sure. Was it wrong? Personally I don't think so - drug laws are so out of date here. ...just saying, people do have reasons to keep their disks encrypted.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is they can lock you up for not giving up your password. I think it is up to five years, but here's catch, they can ask you again then it will be another offense and they can lock you up again. So effectively your choice is to give up your password or you can be locked up until you die, unless the police get bored.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had enough evidence that they were able to get a search warrant to get the data on your computer, you were probably already about to be prosecuted for something pretty substantial.

Oh please, don't be naive. Nowadays, the "something pretty substatial" could be downloading a Katy Perry song or having a botnet virus on your system that sent out some spam.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[trytoguess]

I don't think that will work. Unless the police, FBI, or whomever grabbed your computer at random, they took your computer because they greatly suspect you have something illegal on it (child porn, terrorist material, etc.) If they don't find it, no amount of embarrassing, but legal material is going to convince them. There's an ok chance they'll have to let you go, but like another poster mentioned, you'll have to endure considerable harassment beforehand.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Passwords are covered under the first amendment.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Abalamahalamatandra]

Don't forget the old tried-and-true Firewire attack as well. It's real and I've demonstrated it using a Linux laptop attached to a Windows machine via Firewire.

Apparently it still works quite well for Windows 7 as well.

On Linux you can blacklist the OHCI modules, which means your Firewire ports never come up and won't talk to anything. On Windows, not so much. One iPod with Firewire and enough time to dump some kernel memory is all it takes if your system's running and physically available to me. I can also immediately unlock the screen to get straight in.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Toafan]

In short, there are many ways to give a judge the idea that the use of a hidden volume is likely (ie: check path histories for previously opened files, check temp folders, etc). Not only would these indicate the possibility of a hidden volume, but some files that were meant to be encrypted may be 100% available (eg: Microsoft Word makes temporary backups of files in your %APPDATA% folders in case it crashes and you want to recover your work; as one example). Unless one is very diligent and knows what he/she is doing with respect to encrypting data, it would seem the only safe method is to encrypt the entire disk and boot off of it exclusively, all while keeping the machine itself disconnected from the internet to avoid hacking attempts, and locked in massive safe so the authorities don't install a keylogger (application or physical device) or start taking snapshots of your disk daily to aid in cracking the password.
You may be able to secure your data, but with multiple means of data accidentally being leaked due to the OS or various applications used in day-to-day life, along with unscrupulous policing agencies allowed to overrule fundamental civil rights, it is likely that one will ultimately lose their data and/or freedom either way.

What, and you plan on using Windows to subvert the government? Are you NUTS?
Get yourself a Linux Distro, man! There are plenty of easy-to-use ones, and several paranoid ones that are designed just to enable this kind of thing. Hells, the US Department of Defense does one. Not that I'd trust that either, if I were being subversive. But if it's good enough for their operatives to use...

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[mysidia]

On Linux you can blacklist the OHCI modules

How about Solaris, with a CPU supporting hardware IOMMU ? (meaning that a device driver cannot read or write memory not explicitly allocated to it)

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[fluffy99]

A decent idea, except you can tell in the registry whether it was a usb mass-storage device or not.
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/USB_History_Viewing

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[thejynxed]

In his defense, cryptographers from ye olden days were quite fond of using a form of encryption based on words, phrases, and sentences from certain published books. If you didn't know which particular edition of that book it was, which monk had made the edition, AND have a copy of it (mind you, this was back when most books were still hand-written by monks), you weren't breaking the encryption. Some of the encryption even referenced the particular illuminations that particular monk made in that particular edition of the published text.

There might be 10 copies of the book world-wide, including second or third editions, and only two of those books might have been made by the same monk.

Apparently some of those encrypted texts are STILL not broken today (to be fair, some will never be solved because no editions still exist to decrypt with).

Kind of amazing that some of that old stuff might never be solved, yet all of our modern encryption schemes only require sufficient computational time using computing clusters. I almost wonder how we, in the modern age, would ever decrypt things if Sandskrit or similar languages were still in wide use and the methods of encryption I mentioned were still popular.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[networkBoy]

I think the difference there is that the tats, while covered by clothes, are a physical thing that can be seen, whereas a key that is solely memorized is non tangible.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[DamnStupidElf]

A 40 TB corpus has approximately 4 x 10^16 substrings of less than 1K, or 4 x 10^15 if we assume strings start on word boundaries and an average word length of 10 or less. Even if you charitably assume the whole hash/decrypt/validate process can be done in 1 ms of compute time per candidate, thats 4 x 10^13 seconds (about 1M years) of compute time. Unless Amazon has drastically lowered their prices, I don't think you'll be getting that for $150...

And in ten years, it will only be a thousand years of compute time using your numbers. Ten years later, only a year. Do your secrets only need to last 20 years? I would also remind you of GPU password cracking where billions of cryptographic primitives per second per card is not unusual. Assuming a thousand salting/setup primitive operations per passphrase (a bit lower than my preference for LUKS, but I've seen plenty of software with fewer iterations) would drop your estimate to 1000 GPU-years for an attacker to mount an attack today. Just pay some down-and-out bitcoin miners to put their now-overpriced rigs to use.

I admit that I underestimated the dollar amount for a well designed cryptosystem with iterated salting during key setup for dramatic effect. Taking some basic numbers from the bitcoin folks, it looks like a GPU cryptographic primitive (sha256 or ripemd160) costs around 1e-6 Joules. 4e16 substrings times 1000 primitives costs 4e13 Joules, or about 11 megawatthours, or about <pinky>1 million dollars</pinky>. However, there are probably many redundancies in the 40 TB database and it could be ordered by those redundancies to search through the more common space of text with shorter substrings first making it more likely to find weak passphrases quickly. For a weak cryptosystem where a single cryptographic operation suffices to test a passphrase I was only an order of magnitude off.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[DamnStupidElf]

I said:

You can take a published string and make it a reasonably secure passphrase by adding enough entropy to it, but you still have to remember the entropy that you've added. Why not just start with a diceware passphrase and memorize the entropy directly?

I think that's still a valid point. How well can you misremember a quote? What is the maximum hamming distance between the original quote and a passphrase that you can remember? If you can remember 64 or more bits of entropy to add to an existing quote, you might as well remember a shorter diceware passphrase with the same entropy.

Additionally; how secret is your choice of source material? You can only have a finite number of books in your house, and a larger but finite number within driving distance. The likelihood of you traveling far and wide to generate a passphrase is pretty low. Can you be sure that Echelon didn't record the text (or at least the URLs) it's seen you fetch over your Internet connection? Reducing the search space to only a few thousand sources makes the problem almost embarrassingly simple. Build a probabilistic model of your writing/typing and then use it to find the nearest likely passphrases generated by altering the substrings of sources to better fit your writing style. Most likely you don't choose truly randomly from a set of altered quotes; you look for things in the text that seem easy to remember if they are changed, or that trigger some other memory that makes it easier to remember the other changes. Humans are bad at generating truly random text.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[NotSanguine]

I said: You can take a published string and make it a reasonably secure passphrase by adding enough entropy to it, but you still have to remember the entropy that you've added. Why not just start with a diceware passphrase and memorize the entropy directly? I think that's still a valid point. How well can you misremember a quote? What is the maximum hamming distance between the original quote and a passphrase that you can remember? If you can remember 64 or more bits of entropy to add to an existing quote, you might as well remember a shorter diceware passphrase with the same entropy. Additionally; how secret is your choice of source material? You can only have a finite number of books in your house, and a larger but finite number within driving distance. The likelihood of you traveling far and wide to generate a passphrase is pretty low. Can you be sure that Echelon didn't record the text (or at least the URLs) it's seen you fetch over your Internet connection? Reducing the search space to only a few thousand sources makes the problem almost embarrassingly simple. Build a probabilistic model of your writing/typing and then use it to find the nearest likely passphrases generated by altering the substrings of sources to better fit your writing style. Most likely you don't choose truly randomly from a set of altered quotes; you look for things in the text that seem easy to remember if they are changed, or that trigger some other memory that makes it easier to remember the other changes. Humans are bad at generating truly random text.

Not being a cryptographer by trade, I'll take your word for it. However, I suspect that my suggestion would keep most folks out of PMITA prison, assuming they're not forced to divulge the key..

Unless, of course, the US Government wants to get you badly enough to initiate surveillance complete enough to identify *all* the IP addresses that you specifically have used and when, grab the data collected via Echelon, search your house and identify every book you have, every book you've ever had, every book you borrowed from libraries, friends, enemies, etc. Identify every song, poem, doggerel, Spoonerism ('one swell foop' comes to mind), etc, etc, etc you've every heard, read or sung and analyze all of it to figure out what you *might* be using for an encryption key, I'm thinking they're going to get you no matter what.

As is pointed out here, we all break the law pretty much every day. So, assuming I'm not considered the next Osama bin Laden, I think my TV, Furry, axle-grease fetish porn is safe

I don't mean to sound derisive, I sincerely admire your level of paranoia. I like to think of myself as pretty paranoid when it comes to InfoSec matters, but I guess I'm out of my class here. Thank you for your interesting, if (IMHO) rather extreme point of view. It's definitely food for thought.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Mjec]

Not to possess, only to manufacture or distribute.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[Dogbertius]

While I agree with you on the note of Linux being more secure than Windows in most scenarios, an important thing to take into consideration is that most casual Linux users possess what would be considered administrator or power-user level knowledge of using a computer, while most casual Windows users are not quite that knowledgeable.

More to the point, there are still Linux applications that leave files sitting around in places like the swap partition, or keep copies in the local present working directory (PWD), cache credentials in the $home folder (ie: ~/), and so on. I'm guessing you're referring to certain versions of Knoppix that are designed for security in your post. Good point. There are versions that load everything into RAM, and even clobber the contents of RAM when you shut down so you don't have to worry about people leaving the machine running or deep-freezing the physical RAM chips. As for physical disk access, it only touches an encrypted drive or container, and you can even have it force a dismount and cleanup after X minutes of operation, in case someone steals your laptop and decides to keep it running. I'm not quite that paranoid... yet.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[jwhitener]

Old thread, so likely no one will read this, but...

I read around 5 pages of that pdf, and it was talking about things like MS Word pointing to recently edited files on your inner volume/deniable file system. Or the user making a shortcut to something in the hidden volume.

Surely if you are security conscious enough to create an inner, encrypted, deniable file system, you would be using non-OS interacting applications and not create shortcuts in the outer volume to things in the inner volume.

In fact, the paper specifically said that there is nothing in inherent in windows that gives the inner volume away. Everything they point to is user error.

Re:I wish this was the case in the UK

[F1re]

Good point. I stand corrected.

"more research?"

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

well we [the industry] will be just happy selling encryption with the tagline: so secure - no one can break it - except your average McForensic dude with a software package you can torrent. See, secure!

Re:"more research?"

[betterunixthanunix]

well we [the industry] will be just happy selling encryption with the tagline: so secure - no one can break it - except your average McForensic dude with a software package you can torrent. See, secure!

More like the software industry wants to remain friendly with the Department of Justice, and will gladly push a DoJ-approved cryptosystem on their customers unless their customers start jumping ship. Remember the clipper chip and how a certain large telecom was prepared to play along?

Re:"more research?"

[cusco]

I work with a couple of police departments, and I'd be surprised if any of them could even crack a password, much less decrypt a volume. Sure, there are guys in the IT department that could do it, but they're not "real" police officers so they'd never be allowed to examine evidence. Apparently, at least according to the boys in blue, crimes should only be allowed to be solved by guys who carry guns. Want to see a cop's head explode? Explain to him that you support neighborhood justice groups (which they refer to as 'vigilantes') over centralized courts with expensive lawyers. Only made that mistake once, and fortunately he was transferring out of the area or I might have caused some bad feeling between the department and my employer.

Re:"more research?"

[MightyMartian]

Clearly these police departments are not familiar with using VisualBasic to make a GUI.

Re:"more research?"

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. (Yeah, I got it. :)

Re:"more research?"

[TheGratefulNet]

want to see a lawyer's head explode?

(we all do. read on...)

tell them you support jury nullification.

its almost like telling an electrical repairman that there ARE user-repairable parts inside and that that label is pure hogwash.

lawyers and judges are so smug sure that 'judging guilt' is a hard job, to be left only to those 'qualified'.

the thing is, the so-called pros have done such a bad job over the last few decades, I can't believe that even a random roll of dice would be worse for carrying out justice. perhaps that would even be an upgrade. getting 50/50 would probably BE an upgrade over what we have now.

the fact that regular people are taken out of the loop is actually a safeguard that they are bypassing.

but dare talk to a friendly lawyer about this and they'll likely bite your head off. and if you are in voire dire and dare tell anyone that you are even aware of what JN means, you are immediately dismissed as a juror. worse: if you don't let on during VD and then vote your concience, you can be jailed for contempt!

all for following a legally allowed american principle; but one that has an unspoken 'do not admit to its existence' rule about nullification.

see fija.org for more info. people should all know about this. its one of the best parts of our system, in fact!

Re:"more research?"

[Fnord666]

but dare talk to a friendly lawyer about this and they'll likely bite your head off. and if you are in voire dire and dare tell anyone that you are even aware of what JN means, you are immediately dismissed as a juror. worse: if you don't let on during VD and then vote your concience, you can be jailed for contempt!

That's why I wear a "I Support Jury Nullification!" button to jury duty. I still get to work at the normal time on those days.

Re:"more research?"

[Kjella]

The reason the legal system frowns on jury nullification is that it also gives the jury full freedom to decide based on who is on trial, what their motive was and who the victim is, not just the law or the evidence. If someone gets beat up for waving a Muhammad cartoon around, I don't want an Islamist on the jury to be able to say "serves him right for insulting the great prophet, I refuse to convict". Nor would I like a jury that can nullify rape charges because they feel the victim behaved slutty. Or as is one of historic reasons it's frowned on, when a bunch of white men refuse to convict a white man for killing a black man. Now there are some mostly victimless crimes where this may not be that important, but many crimes do have victims and it is important that justice is served. Also it would make convictions a matter of probabilistics, I don't think many would feel it is much like justice if people are convicted 70% of the time at random. Ideally you want all juries, given the same evidence, to reach the same conclusion. Nullification is anything but that.

Re:"more research?"

[mr100percent]

Yes, jury nullification is a great way out, but it's also ridiculously rare. People tend to trust their government, and unless you can truly convince the jurors you're a regular joe and not some genius mastermind criminal hacker that the prosecution is painting you out to be, it's going to be very hard to sell the jury on this option.

Re:"more research?"

[dynamo]

I had this same idea, then I was called, and I did mention jury nullification while questioned by lawyers to see if they wanted me on the jury. I partially wanted to make sure that the rest of the jury pool heard of the concept, and I partially wanted to see what would happen. I ended up being dismissed, though for full disclosure I asked to be, because I had too much going on with work.

Re:"more research?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Many many many of us support jury nullification.
Probably most defense attorneys do.

--anon. J.D.

Re:"more research?"

[sFurbo]

Ideally you want all courts, given the same evidence, to reach the same conclusion. Juries are anything but that.

FTFY

Re:"more research?"

[Anonymous Coward]

So your hostnames are jury-nullification1, jury-nullification-2, etc, pertinent files having the name jury nullification in them eg, /etc/jury-nullification-passwd, and the contents have the string jury nullification peppered around the file? To decrypt your truecrypt deniability volumes, your key is "jury nullification pwns * "?

Re:"more research?"

[TheGratefulNet]

turn it around: I trust 'regular people' a bit more than the bought-and-paid-for laws we now have.

if someone is caught 'downloading', you want him to pay his whole house's value in 'damages'? the riaa and mpaa can do that to you. otoh, have some civil minded citizens on the jury and they may NOT award your house to the record/movie industry.

it could go either way, but I want the human element in there. I just do. trusting cold machines often is a losing proposition when the system that makes the laws is corrupt to high hell.

the legal system needs to be tempered by humanity. THAT is the purpose of JN. to let real people say 'hey, wait a minute! this does not seem right!'. and they have the ability to over-ride anything.

btw, if its such a bad idea, why is it still on the books?

its denied if you ask about it. like I said, you get contempted if you dare use it in court; but if its such a bad idea, why has it stood the test of time and not been repealed?

Re:"more research?"

[TheGratefulNet]

they kicked you out since you 'raise awareness' and that's the last thing they want.

INFORMED juries are not what they want.

this is why I don't even bother anymore. I won't get selected since I let on that I can think for myself!

we want robots; not thinkers.

tl;dr: "no soup for you."

(NEXT!)

Re:"more research?"

[Mia'cova]

The primary market is corporate security. They have no problem handing data over when legally required (officially).. but they want the encryption on a stolen device to be pretty damned hard to crack.

Re:"more research?"

[Maritz]

Ridiculous... How do they track IP addresses?!

obligatory

[dr.Flake]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png

Re:obligatory

[pla]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png

Fortunately, as bad as they've gotten, police in the US still try to maintain the facade that they count as the "good guys", at least to the extent that they don't (frequently) torture information out of people.

Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.

Re:obligatory

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Why would we resort to torture when we have pain compliance?

Re:obligatory

[nerdonamotorcycle]

Came here for this, leaving satisfied.

Re:obligatory

[xaxa]

Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.

From the videos of what the US police have done this week I wouldn't be so sure.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/police-pepper-spraying-arrest.html for instance.

(I would call pepper spraying someone so much they're coughing up blood 45 minutes later torture, but maybe Americans call it 'discomfort'.)

Re:obligatory

[shutdown -p now]

Keep in mind that there's this thing called "extraordinary rendition", where you can be a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil by U.S. agencies - and end up somewhere in Egypt, where the local goons are politely asked to obtain the keys from you without resorting to any illegal measures *wink wink*.

Mind you, this requires one to be designated a "suspected terrorist" today, but then all it takes is for executive to say that you're one. They likely won't bother for a pedo, but if, say, you worked on WikiLeaks, that might be a different matter.

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a special hardware device designed to resist this class of attack.

It's called a Ruger 357Magnum...

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not torture, it's a freedom tickle.

Re:obligatory

[lister king of smeg]

i am sorry that you where moded down, people seems to believe that if they disagree with some one they should mod you down rather than come up with reasons why they are right and you are wrong

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.

From the videos of what the US police have done this week I wouldn't be so sure.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/police-pepper-spraying-arrest.html for instance.

(I would call pepper spraying someone so much they're coughing up blood 45 minutes later torture, but maybe Americans call it 'discomfort'.)

No, we call that what happens to stupid hippies.

Re:obligatory

[The Master Control P]

I'm sure the thought of your gun will have the government's paramilitary SWAT team quaking in their boots as they simultaneously break down your door and throw a flashbang into your bedroom.

Re:obligatory

[dissy]

I always find it funny that every single time a protestor is hurt not what what really happens it's ALWAYS the polices fault it's kinda absurd how these ass hats can never be in the wrong it's always big bad police officer

So basically you are saying that there is some minor crime that can be committed by an unarmed and non-dangerous person that warrants a 15 minute long pepper spray session as a legit and suitable punishment?

You are one sick fucker.

If a judge ordered that exact punishment, for ANY crime, he would be kicked off the bench so fast he wouldn't know what happened.

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Enhanced freedom tickle...

Re:obligatory

[phantomfive]

I watched that movie earlier. The protestors had surrounded the police and wouldn't let them leave. That's why they had linked arms, sitting on the ground.

Seriously, in that situation, what do you expect will happen? Police will join you and sing Kumbaya?

Re:obligatory

[rthille]

Really?

http://www.treehugger.com/culture/photo-will-start-real-revolution.html

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. That is what the NSA (No Such Agency, Never Say Anything.....National Security Agency) describes as "Rubber Hose Cryptography". There are several benefits to RHC: 1) The agents get to beat their daily frustrations out on someone 2) --Unlike (1) this one is operationally better: there is plausible leak from the agent. They may have even broken the code, but they want to break the person with keys because if the 'other side' knows that they can break the code, then they will invest heavily in a better stronger code. If they can beat the secrets out of whoever they have in hand, then that person will yelp that the leak was tortured out of them (and the other side might not invest and thus, no new codes to crack/break and no new investment in technology/time, etc). Notice that (2) also brings all the benefits of (1), and on your average police force, the first caption in the cartoon may not even be possible, but they get the second caption very well, and even if unsuccessful, they will try and try. Even if its futile from the start, they will try the blindfolded/wet towel over the mouth with water pouring onto it/rubber hose/telephone book to the back of the head technique over and over because GITMO made it all OK, GW Bush said its ok, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to 'armed combatants', the Geneva it was signed in wasn't also in Wisconsin, and Americans reserve the right to treat international law as 'mere suggestion'.

Re:obligatory

[DaleSwanson]

i am sorry that you where moded down, people seems to believe that if they disagree with some one they should mod you down rather than come up with reasons why they are right and you are wrong

I think the reason he was modded down was he was making comments that were plainly trolling. See this:

personally I'm not stupid enough to push into a wall of riot police cause I know it will end badly for my dumb ass then again when I'm protesting I do it peacefully

He was either purposely trying to troll, or he was commenting on the incident without even watching the videos in the link. I don't think there's any other way to describe the group of students sitting in a public space than peaceful. They certainly weren't pushing into any riot police.

Re:obligatory

[Sollord]

God you're an idiot and now your just making shit up to suit you twisted world views where the police are evil and torturing people while these spoiled little fucks are perfect little saints who never do anything wrong. It's not torture if you have the freedom to leave at any time but intentionally refuse to do so. Get a fucking clue. 15mins my ass the two videos I've seen show one form Portland and one from san fran show short blasts lasting less then 30 seconds if that.

Re:obligatory

[jbolden]

And I'm sure you voted Democrat and supported Democratic causes prior to OWS it is just their conduct that turned you off.

Re:obligatory

[xaxa]

I saw police walk over the "barrier". Don't see how they were being prevented from leaving.

I expect lot better from America. If that was Syria there'd be a protest outside their embassy.

Re:obligatory

[xaxa]

What did they do wrong? Sit on a road?

"Freedom to leave at any time"? People like you are what's wrong with America (speaking as a foreigner).

Re:obligatory

[Sollord]

Your right I don't vote Democrat because I don't believe the Government should support my sorry ass and pay for everything which is what they seem to be pushing more and more. Based on all them political tests I'd be classified as a left leaning Centrist or Libertarian.

Re:obligatory

[Sollord]

They could of protested on the grass and not been disruptive little assholes who think they're entitled to do whatever they damn well please. Then again they want the government to pay for or give them everything they need/want so guess it's no surprise.

Re:obligatory

[allo]

everyone who distributes xkcd without the title= text, needs to be punished!

Re:obligatory

[jbolden]

Which I think proves my point about the conduct of the OWS being the issue.

As for the rest, if you are Libertarian then there is no reason OWS should appeal to you. They are asking for a much stronger government regulation of the financial sector, redistribution.... it is hard to imagine policies more at odds with Libertarianism.

Re:obligatory

[Sollord]

I think they're acting like spoiled brats among other things plus the don't go to the police if raped instead let the "leaders" of protest sort it out by kicking the rapist out of the camp bullshit didn't help my opinion of some of the OWS crowd at all.

This is sort of what I mean by my political leaning...
http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=0.12&soc=-0.56

Re:obligatory

[jbolden]

It is not at all uncommon for rape victims to not want to get involved in a full blown criminal investigation. You see the same things at colleges all the time, where women come forward with rape allegations and don't want the police involved but rather college administrators. Moreover in this particular case, they belong to a community being actively persecuted by the police subject to frequent violent confrontations.

This is a common problem in policing, you see it in ethnic ghettos as well. If the police aren't seen as representing the community, the community starts treating the local police force like an occupying army and have no interest in assisting them in enforcing their laws. Instead sometimes the community sets up a community based legal enforcement mechanisms which do have the support of the governed population. Again, among whites colleges campus are a place you see this. Police offers are quite often representing the administrations or the townies against the students and consequently the students are remarkably hostile when the police want their assistance for crimes, even crimes being perpetrated against college students.

If the police don't like being thought of that way, they need to stop acting like mercenaries for corporate interests. From the 1930s the the 1970s police generally would not get involved in peaceful protest for precisely the reason that the people who were involved in political protests quite often go on to be politicians and their negative attitudes towards law enforcement continue even when they are in positions of power.

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could Have"

sigh

Re:obligatory

[brantondaveperson]

It is nothing short of a bald-faced lie to suggest that the police were prevented from leaving. The officer who sprays the line of students sitting (unmoving, peaceful) on the ground steps over them first. He could have simply walked away, left them to their own devices, problem (not that I could see an actual problem) solved.

I mean, how long are those kids going to sit there on the path? And in any case, how is it a problem to sit down in protest? Let them sit, let them chant, let them have their say.

They do have a legitimate point to make in any case, the rich *are* too rich. And the poor *are* to poor. However you think that this situation came about, there can be no position taken other than that this disparity represents a huge problem. Pepper spray will not solve it.

Re:obligatory

[phantomfive]

They do have a legitimate point to make in any case, the rich *are* too rich. And the poor *are* to poor.

Seriously?

Re:obligatory

[brantondaveperson]

Yes. Except me.

Re:obligatory

[gmhowell]

Women want college administrators instead of the police involved because the former have a ridiculously low level of proof as their standard. The one in four statistic is a lie.

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only torture when they get their XBox taken from them.

Re:obligatory

[xaxa]

They do have a legitimate point to make in any case, the rich *are* too rich. And the poor *are* to poor.

Seriously?

Are you seriously questioning that?

Re:obligatory

[phantomfive]

Yeah. Who are you to judge what is too rich? Why should I feel sorry for a bunch of people who protest that they are poor, while wearing designer clothes and holding smartphones?

Re:obligatory

[xaxa]

I don't care to argue -- there's little point, I expect we have radically different viewpoints, especially online.

"the rich *are* too rich. And the poor *are* to poor" is something pretty much everyone I know would agree with, and a very common view in my country. The disagreements come with how (or whether) to correct that. The previous government broadly favoured providing more services and payment to the poor (education, recreation, etc) and increasing government spending. The current government is removing those services, and reducing the payments, which is supposed to encourage people to get (better) jobs. Since they've reduced government spending, and there's not much private spending, I'm wondering where the jobs are supposed to come from.

Re:obligatory

[phantomfive]

Since they've reduced government spending, and there's not much private spending, I'm wondering where the jobs are supposed to come from.

In every recession, people start new businesses. In the US, the biggest employers are small businesses. So we'll come out of the recession.

Re:obligatory

[Coren22]

So your position is that people protesting the arrest of a nonviolent protest in a non violent way should be peppersprayed?

The people were protesting the arrest of the Occupy people by sitting. The police officer then proceeded to pepper spray them at close range, causing chemical burns requiring hospitalization in at least one case. The officer misused pepper spray, and used it in a situation where it wasn't warranted. I am surprised he isn't up on charges for assault yet.

No matter if you agree with the protesters or not, there was an assault committed by an officer of the law. If you are okay with that, I wonder what kind of human you are.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

U2

[Anonymous Coward]

In a rare moment, U2 said something wise. "A liar won't believe anyone else."

Giving up passwords

[earthloop]

(unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do);

In the UK he does. And people have been punished for not handing it over.

Re:Giving up passwords

[DannyTUK]

Yes, we gave up that particular freedom [to not self-incriminate] without so much as a whimper, cough or sneeze. When technology fails the UK (and EU) simply make up a new law against it's citizens.

Re:Giving up passwords

[tiffany352]

"Police say they are still trying to crack the password. ®" I think that'll take a few trillion universe ages given it's 50 characters long.

Re:Giving up passwords

[bhtooefr]

Except he doesn't have to.

He can be punished for not doing it, but there's no law of physics that FORCES him to give up the password.

Hence why spies have cyanide pills and such - such that it then becomes impossible for them to even give up the password.

Re:Giving up passwords

[SuricouRaven]

Actually, we never had that one.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

A law that only benefits the guilty. If you're innocent but dont give up your password, you lose sixteen weeks.. If you're guilty you lose only sixteen weeks in comparison to potentially years.

Does anyone think this through?

Re:Giving up passwords

[wisnoskij]

I am not sure if that is true for over here in north america either.

Passwords have never been considered all that private.
Lots of companies make their employees give theirs out, and you always hear about court cased that involved a judge ordered password reveal.

Re:Giving up passwords

[0123456]

Hence why spies have cyanide pills and such - such that it then becomes impossible for them to even give up the password.

My SSD is encrypted with AES in hardware. As I understand it, you only have to send one ATA command to the disk to tell it to generate a new key and thereby make the existing data unreadable to anyone.

Personally I'd prefer a 'wipe key' button on my laptop to a cyanide pill in my teeth.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

if you are 'innocent' why do you encrypt your data in the first place?

Re:Giving up passwords

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

(unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do);

In the UK he does. And people have been punished for not handing it over.

Unfortunately for everybody, really, the potential 5-year RIPA sentence for refusing to disclose a key is crazy draconian as a threat to induce Joe Public to open every Turing-complete device in his entire life to the cops(after what is, no doubt, a impeccable judicial review); but it is substantially less scary than the sentence you might get for various serious crimes that the key might be hiding, along with any incentive provided by your criminal colleagues in favor of loyalty to the organization...

Re:Giving up passwords

[klingens]

Companies have the rights to passwords to company data and property.
And courts cannot order the defendant to give a password if this would incriminate the defendant: 5th amendment.

Re:Giving up passwords

[s0litaire]

You can get up to 2 years i think under RIPA for not disclosing a password! the reason the kid only got 16 weeks was that he was still technically a minor.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Smallpond]

if you are 'innocent' why do you encrypt your data in the first place?

If you are innocent, why do you post as AC?

Re:Giving up passwords

[Tyrannosaur]

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." That depends- is the right not to self incriminate one of these endowed by our Creator? Assuming of course you agree with the writers of this document.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Tyrannosaur]

Mark? you there?

Re:Giving up passwords

[Xugumad]

Frequently intrigued how many people miss that much of the US constitution was written to provide rights people didn't have in the UK...

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

If your response is to the "Actually, we never had that one." post, then you really need to read the posts he is responding too. At the top it mentions the UK. His statement of "we" refers to those in the UK. Not those in the USA.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot. It doesn't benefit the guilty. The alternate is that this law DOESN'T exist, and then the guilty don't get any punishment at all.

Re:Giving up passwords

[geekmux]

Yes, we gave up that particular freedom [to not self-incriminate] without so much as a whimper, cough or sneeze. When technology fails the UK (and EU) simply make up a new law against it's citizens.

My apologies if the illusion of any semblance of Rights still seems to be wafting in the air over the US. Trust me, you'll get a hearty laugh in the face from law enforcement in the US too when trying to bring up "ancient" history like pleading the 5th. Remember anyone with encryption must be some sort of terrorist these days...in fact just as a matter of convenience(those pesky "Rights" really get in the way of a good interrogation), everyone is treated like a terrorist...that way, they can simply waive you of those pesky Rights and all...

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

if you are 'innocent' why do you encrypt your data in the first place?

Ok, try this: I have nothing to hide but that doesn't mean I have anything I want to share. There is nothing illegal about my genitals but that doesn't mean I'm going to drop my pants for anyone who might want to take a peek to find out. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Z00L00K]

Because you don't want to give away commercially or personally sensitive data - like addresses or business plans.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't the UK part of the same EU ?

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2006:0174:FIN:EN:HTML

2.4. Privilege against self-incrimination
The presumption of innocence includes the privilege against self-incrimination which is made up of the right of silence and not to be compelled to produce inculpating evidence. The maxim nemo tenetur prodere seipsum , (“no person is to be compelled to accuse himself”) applies. The accused may refuse to answer questions and to produce evidence. The ECtHR[24] held that, although not specifically mentioned in the ECHR, the privilege against self-incrimination is a generally recognised international standard which lies “at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure”. It protects the accused against improper compulsion by the authorities, thus reducing the risk of miscarriages of justice and embodying the equality of arms principle. The prosecution must prove its case without resort to evidence obtained through coercion or oppression. Security and public order cannot justify the suppression of these rights[25].They are linked rights, any compulsion to produce incriminating evidence being an infringement of the right of silence. The State infringed an accused’s right of silence when it sought to compel him to produce bank statements to customs investigators[26]. Coercion to co-operate with the authorities in the pre-trial process may infringe the privilege against self-incrimination and jeopardise the fairness of any subsequent hearing.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Pseudonym Authority]

I would gladly be sent to prison for 2 years for obstruction of justice, rather than going for what ever I was hiding. Maybe not worth it for petty fraud, but some things that people would like to encrypt can land them a sentence that they couldn't possible live to see expire.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Robadob]

Wish i had mod points for this.

Re:Giving up passwords

[automandc]

First, the quote was from the Declaration of Independence, a document that preceded the U.S. Constitution by more than a decade, was purely symbolic in nature -- which is to say, it has almost zero application in the law of the United States of America.

What both of you are trying to recall from your ancient civics classes is the Fifth Amendment (part of the Bill of Rights, passed 2 years after the Constitution), which reads (in relevant part):

No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. . . .

Whether or not coercing someone to unlock the chest where they put their confession is the same as forcing them to incriminate themselves is a tricky and unsettled question of law that we (the Yanks) are still working on. (Whether the coercion is beating them with a $5 wrench, or putting them in prison indefinitely for "contempt", the principle is the same.)

Your meta-point is quite true, however - the creation and protection of such individual rights in conflicts with the State was the fundamental schism that led North America to diverge from the previously (fairly homogenous) Anglo/European civilization about 200 years ago. Now build some Settler[early game]/Armor units[late game] and get out there and spread the word to the rest of the map.

Re:Giving up passwords

[icebike]

My SSD is encrypted with AES in hardware. As I understand it, you only have to send one ATA command to the disk to tell it to generate a new key and thereby make the existing data unreadable to anyone.

Personally I'd prefer a 'wipe key' button on my laptop to a cyanide pill in my teeth.

Getting the oppertunity to send that one key is tricky if you are in handcuffs.

Better to have a key you hand over after a suitable number of threats which does the new key generation. You can always blame the cops for being technological cavemen and damaging your computer. He who touches it last acquires all blame.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Because my photography is mine, and a stolen hard drive means anybody can freely access years of copyrighted work that's only available online with watermarks, and I make my living from selling my current photography and back library. Because my writing is similarly mine. Because I have confidential information about well over fifteen hundred clients on my HD, none of which I'd like to fall into a competitor's hands. Because I have pornography of myself and my partner on there that neither of us want anyone else to have access to.

All of which is innocent, all of which nobody but those I wish to will get access to.

Re:Giving up passwords

[tqk]

if you are 'innocent' why do you encrypt your data in the first place?

WTF are you doing on /.?!? You're obviously not getting much out of the experience. Idiot!

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I have personal stuff and enjoy my privacy.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

To protect my data from those who *aren't* innocent.

Does anyone think *anything* through here?

Re:Giving up passwords

[MaskedSlacker]

Identity theft. Laptops are quite stealable, and I have a lot of financial/confidential client data on mine.

You could retort: Well, what's wrong with Law Enforcement seeing it then?

Answer: Not much, but anything they can crack the crooks can crack better.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Travelsonic]

That fails. Privacy is not sharing == form of concealment == something humans desire, exercise regularly conscious, you're human, therefore you use / believe in privacy regularly, and thus can literally have nothing to hide.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Travelsonic]

WHOOPS, CAN NOT have nothing to hide, I meant

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Frequently intrigued how many people miss that much of the US constitution was written to provide rights people don't have in the UK...

FTFY.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Travelsonic]

That fails. Privacy is not sharing == form of concealment == something humans desire, exercise regularly both consciously and subconsciously. Any little bit of concealment == "hiding something" regardless of intent. You are human, therefore this all bodes true, therefore you can NOT have "nothing to hide" Period.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Onymous Coward]

That must really suck if you're carrying around an old drive filled with nothing but truly random data.

Would having geeks often carrying entropy drives around create a DoS (and plausible deniability shield) against this kind of privacy invasion?

Anyway, as much as RIPA is already a horror, does it at least require that it be certain encryption is in use before a person can be punished for not handing over a password?

Re:Giving up passwords

[fluffy99]

My SSD is encrypted with AES in hardware. .

Depending on the brand, only the key is stored using AES. In many cases the actual data on the disk is encrypted with a weak encryption or even not at all. Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

They can only do this with proof the password exists, which with multiple hidden partitions is kind of difficult.

Re:Giving up passwords

[budgenator]

A Canadian Law Enforcement Officer once told me about how amusing it was to be lectured about civil rights, by another Canadian who learned about his rights by watching American TV; not everyone is American, and even if you are don't bet your life or liberty on what you learned watching CSI.

Re:Giving up passwords

[the eric conspiracy]

What utter fucking bullshit. The rest of the world was under despotic or monarchistic systems of government where essentially nobody had any rights under law when the Constitution was written. It was a stunning advance that triggered revolutions and changes in government that are still happening around the world today.

Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man (1791), which was an refutation of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund Burke says that true social stability arises if the nation's poor majority are governed by a minority of wealthy aristocrats, and that lawful inheritance of power (wealth, religious, governing) ensured the propriety of political power being the exclusive domain of the nation's élite social class â" the nobility - triggered a trial in absentia in England where he was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead for seditious libel.

You have no fucking clue as to what the standards of the time were and what the people who put forth the American Revolution were undertaking. Yes they were not morally perfect under their own standards, and the knew it. But change can only happen so fast, and what they did is a start that this planet is still not completely brought forward.

So when your country has advanced enough to elect a president or prime minister or grand vizier or whatever regardless of race or cultural origin let me know. Until then better look to your own house before insulting those that put their lives on the line on a daily basis to push forth the human ideals of freedom and equality that no society even today fully implements.

Re:Giving up passwords

[JWW]

Thanks for clarifying. Before that your post was amazingly cognitively dissonant with your sig.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Your meta-point is quite true, however - the creation and protection of such individual rights in conflicts with the State was the fundamental schism that led North America to diverge from the previously (fairly homogenous) Anglo/European civilization about 200 years ago. Now build some Settler[early game]/Armor units[late game] and get out there and spread the word to the rest of the map.

1688/89 points at you and laughs at your Americana version of history. The following are from laws are at least 100 years older...

That excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted.

That the forceing the leidges to Depone against themselves in capitall Crymes however the punishment be restricted is Contrary to law

Re:Giving up passwords

[mr100percent]

Cool idea. Are there any systems out there that have such a "duress password?"

Re:Giving up passwords

[Blue Stone]

The relevant sentence on this would appear to invalidate RIPA and any jail term or punishment or fine resulting form a refusal to hand over one's encryption keys (IANAL etc)

"Requiring the accused to testify was not incompatible with the ECHR, although it would be if any conviction were based solely or mainly on a refusal to testify."

Re:Giving up passwords

[Ardyvee]

Except that the UK is exempt from abiding by it. The same way the UK got around keeping their pounds instead of adopting the Euro.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you actually this dumb, or was that satire?

Re:Giving up passwords

[syrinx]

Uh, I think your sarcasm detector needs work.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not.

Re:Giving up passwords

[einhverfr]

Interestingly enough a lot of it was also to protect rights that people DID have in the UK but not the colonies at the time (trial by jury) or that they DID have in the UK at the time but have since lost (right to keep and bear arms, for example).

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they can. If you are protected from harm you can be compelled. Sure, immunity might make it OK; however, it depends.... You go free but everybody knows you took a deal and possibly that you are 100% guilty of whatever it was but got off on a technicality.

Think about it, the judge orders you to give it up because its not a criminal case and you will not incriminate yourself (no 5th.) Later you get sued in civil court by the company.

Mention terrorism and they may get you anyway; if you are outside the USA they can can just execute you without any due process.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is, we were willing to dispense with the monarchies and go our own way to further the vision. By no means am I aruging that principles of liberty were an "American invention". Our political system is the product of ideas that were born in Europe and experimented and tested in North America.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Nelson Mandela used to be a terrorist to the USA... State Dept misclassified people all the time and still does.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Tyrannosaur]

obviously. I was not referencing the document, as i said "assuming of course you agree with the writers of this document" - if you dont agree with the writers then my point is invalid. Their point is that rights do not come from man, but from a higher being.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Tyrannosaur]

obviously. I was not referencing the document, as i said "assuming of course you agree with the *writers* of this document" - if you dont agree with the writers then my point is invalid. Their point is that rights do not come from man, but from a higher being. Please don't be an idiot.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Section 49 of RIPA allows police/law enforcement agencies/security services/military to demand access to encrypted data. Section 53 allows people to be convicted if they fail to disclose this information.

This EU law sounds like it could get 49 and 53 taken off the books.

Re:Giving up passwords

[tsotha]

There was an article on slashdot about this very thing just a few months ago. The consensus seems to be your encryption keys are not covered under the 5th amendment. They're the digital equivalent to a safe combination, something judges can legally force you to disclose.

Re:Giving up passwords

[JesseMcDonald]

Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.

Really? Considering that full 256-bit AES encryption of all the data in software, e.g. with LUKS, is not "horribly slow", even on relatively ancient CPUs, a drive with a dedicated AES chip should be able to do the same thing while remaining reasonably performant.

Note that this does not mean that I would be surprised to hear that the designers cut corners, perhaps for cost reasons. I just don't see how it could be justified on a performance basis.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Jeremi]

Getting the oppertunity to send that one key is tricky if you are in handcuffs.

Aha! I sense a market opportunity for my Fake Molar WiFi transmitter!

(it would beat the traditional cyanide-filled fake molar, anyway)

Better to have a key you hand over after a suitable number of threats which does the new key generation. You can always blame the cops for being technological cavemen and damaging your computer. He who touches it last acquires all blame.

Yes, but I think they usually disconnect the drive, make a copy of it using their own hardware, and then examine the copy, for that reason. Or if they don't, they should.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Cmon now. The amount of power needed to do fast AES is not *that* demanding. While hardware that does all of AES at high speed is relatively complex, you need only implement a few operations that are tough in GP instruction sets to make things far better... the scale up of parallelization block ciphers for FDE on relatively simple hardware will far surpass the raw I/O speed of todays hard disks. This may change, but for now that is not the problem.

Lack of demand for an effective consumer grade solution is pretty much it.

Re:Giving up passwords

[cheekyjohnson]

Assuming of course you agree with the writers of this document.

I live in the US, and I certainly don't agree with anything that says anything like that. I don't really believe in magical rights fairies (or whatever it is that grants rights).

Re:Giving up passwords

[fluffy99]

Seagate published a paper to justify why they went with 128-bit AES. The bottom line is that 256-bit encryption impacted disk throughput. That said, their Momentus 7200 FDE line is just as fast as their non-encrypting line.

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp596_128-bit_versus_256_bit.pdf

Re:Giving up passwords

[Grishnakh]

That's the ticket right there: a "password" which actually wipes out the encrypted partition. Once it's deleted, what can they do to you?

Re:Giving up passwords

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, for a second I thought he was an Obama supporter with cognitive dissonance that blatant.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

As with everything it is a cost benefit thing, but 256-bit AES does not mean infinite cost, and it doesn't necessarily mean some huge cost, it just means that Seagate felt that it wasn't worth it, and their marketing department thought it would be a good idea to followup with a piece to convince retards like you that actually think "technical" whitepapers are in the same league as a journal article because they have footnotes. While the marketing doc linked isn't completely wrong, do you actually think Seagate is going to give an unbiased analysis of features they don't currently offer??

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

My SSD is encrypted with AES in hardware. .

Depending on the brand, only the key is stored using AES. In many cases the actual data on the disk is encrypted with a weak encryption or even not at all. Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.

That is completely false. Even when running as software on a modern CPU AES compression/decompression can be faster than the read/write speeds of hard drives. A hard drive would probably use an AES ASIC that would be as fast as needed to not be a bottle neck.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Or have a system that has kind of a dead man switch. If no key is entered every 24 hours the system wipes.

Re:Giving up passwords

[icebike]

No good. Some of us venture out of the basement once in a while.

Re:Giving up passwords

[JesseMcDonald]

I can readily believe that there is some impact on throughput; there is with software FDE, after all. I just find it hard to believe that 256-bit hardware AES would make the drive "horribly slow". Of course, how much of a throughput hit you can tolerate depends on the application.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking Harkonnen traitor.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually yeah (even if you don't believe in "their Creator": the right to not self-incriminate most definitely can maintain a human's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Really, fuck you.

Re:Giving up passwords

[SuricouRaven]

This is clearly false: If rights did come from a higher being, then they would have been there for all of history and in all places. There would have been no reason for the declaration of independance to point them out, or the bill of rights to enumerate some of the more important ones.

Re:Giving up passwords

[naranek]

This only works as long as they are using the original data. I don't know what the standard operating procedure is, but you'd think that the first thing the investigator does is make an image of the drive to make sure he/she doesn't accidentally anything. It would then be also trivial to restore the old keys and ask for the real password.

Re:Giving up passwords

[BlueCoder]

Not possible. First thing that happens is the data is copied. Even the 12 year old working for the cops (trying to explain computers to them) knows that much. The encryption mechanism has to be built not into the controller but into the actual drive itself and when it gets to the CIA the high schools seniors they have working for them know not to trust the interface board on the bottom of hard disks and replace them. Indeed they more than likely have people on call from the major hard disk manufacturers.

What the CIA does to combat hard drive encryption is to install a simple pass through devices much like key loggers. At the more sophisticated level they can replace the surface mount chips on a motherboard in 15 minutes. They do this if there is an external dongle that might hold the key which is usually part of it. For actual key-loggers they don't need to install anything, just place a device nearby that can capture the EMF signals generated by a keyboard. With flash drives now you can imagine they could capture keystrokes for a hundred years!

Hard encryption includes the dongle and the password. The best encryption involves interactivity with symbols on a screen and selected by mouse and keyboard in a system of one time passwords all done from a custom replaceable software GUI plugin.

It's often easier to crack the backups then the original equipment.

Re:Giving up passwords

[BlueCoder]

If you are innocent then why do you need a lawyer?

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

SSD + "hardware" encryption engine... you don't understand what you're really talking about.

For software based encryption, see Truecrypt benchmarks and see for yourself.

Re:Giving up passwords

[cpghost]

Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.

Not at all. Maybe you're confusing AES (symmetric cipher) with asymmetric encryption methods based on Diffie-Hellman, RSA etc..., which ARE horribly slow for anything more substantial than encrypting the key for the symmetric cipher. AES itself is pretty fast, actually.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

*Actually, we never had that one.*

I think in Finland at least we have that one, that we don't have to witness against ourself or provide evidence against ourself. I recall that they even said so. The questioning isn't under oath anyways - however the courts will pin more weight on the log from the questionings than on what is said in the court - that is a sad when coupled with that you have to be really careful that the coppers don't put just whatever they want as the log. They tried that with me - I had them rewrite the log as the actual conversation/answers had gone, if I had just signed the log I would have been fucked in court, though the confession they wrote for me didn't even make sense.

I was questioned as a minor, dragged out of school mid-day, taken to home and had random computer related stuff confiscated. funny thing about that was that they wouldn/couldn't specify exactly what I had done(there was plenty they could have, though, but actually stuff done as a damages-only minor so they would have had to show damages..).

(didn't get charged, fwim - took them over 2 _years_ to decide that)

Re:Giving up passwords

[cpghost]

The alternate is that this law DOESN'T exist, and then the guilty don't get any punishment at all.

But doesn't the presumption of innocence hold in this case? Without a conviction (that should be based on the proof that the prosecution failed to provide), the defendant isn't guilty in the legal sense, and it is only proper that she wouldn't get a punishment in this case. Yeah, I know, legal thinking is rather weird, but that's the way it is.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Prune]

> Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.

I call BS. My Blackberry is fully encrypted with AES, not just the keys yet when connected to a PC copying large video files from it is not any slower, and the hardware AES chip is a tiny IC in the phone. I see no reason a few dollars chip wouldn't be used in hardware encrypted USB drives which are fairly expensive (plus, the USB drive doesn't even have the power constraints of a mobile device).

Re:Giving up passwords

[icebike]

So it's easy then?

Then what the hell is this entire story all about? Did you even read the title, let alone the summary?

Some of you people watch way too much TV.

Now go back and read both the summary and the linked article, and try to remember that every local sheriff or municipal police station, doesn't have the option of calling the cia, especially when they're in Britain.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Yes, but that is irrelevant for your quote: the quote is about the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which is connected to the Council of Europe rather than the EU [NOT to be confused with the European Council, which is part of the EU]. Russia and Turkey are signatories to the ECHR as member stats of the Council of Europe, but not members of the EU. The UK, of course, is member state of the EU and of the Council of Europe, so is a signatory of the ECHR and thus under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

2) I don't know if anyone convicted under RIPA has brought the case to the ECtHR, but I suspect not since that takes a long time (you can only 'appeal' tot he ECtHR after exhausting all possibilities for appeal under national law; a quick google as not given a lot of info.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.

Lulwat? A sub-$100 FPGA can do AES faster than your hard drive can move data. Even cheaper on an ASIC. Here's a free implementation

One of the criteria for choosing an algorithm for AES was that it could be implemented fast in hardware. The only real concern you should have about an "AES" drive is if it's using Electronic Codebook mode instead of a mode specified for disk encryption - and whether key derivation is done securely.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Mia'cova]

Intel 320 SSDs use 128-bit AES. They're still bloody fast SSDs, one of the fastest over a 3.0 Gbit/s SATA connections. The encryption + 3.0 perf make these exceptionally good for corporate laptops.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it contains personal financial information, or an unpublished novel, or naughty photos of his wife, or something else that one wouldn't want to be available to whichever lowlife might one day steal his laptop?

Re:Giving up passwords

[geekmux]

There was an article on slashdot about this very thing just a few months ago. The consensus seems to be your encryption keys are not covered under the 5th amendment. They're the digital equivalent to a safe combination, something judges can legally force you to disclose.

Yes, but the real question is who bought and paid for that "consensus"? Don't think a single legal precedent is ever made today without someone benefiting from it significantly, and thus would have significant reason to manipulate a decision in their favor. In this case, those fighting the encryption-wielding "terrorists" will gain the most by continuing to justify their jobs (remember every single person who works for DHS or TSA didn't have a job position or title less than 10 years ago). There are probably others that gained significantly by removing our Rights too, but my point stands. The legal sector is overshadowed by no one when it comes to manipulation for gain.

Re:Giving up passwords

[Tastecicles]

Right to Silence in the UK was curtailed by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which adjusts the arrest caution to read "...You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court..."

What this basically means is that the SECOND you consent to legal detention you also consent to the PRESUMPTION OF GUILT. Now the burden is on YOU to prove your INNOCENCE. Staying silent does not help you any more. Staying silent is the sure route to a guilty verdict.

IAAL.

Re:Giving up passwords

[AdamJS]

Except drugs and beatings and coercion via threats regarding family and friends.

Not a guarantee, like you said, but highly doubtful that one would fail.

Re:Giving up passwords

[bentcd]

Whether or not coercing someone to unlock the chest where they put their confession is the same as forcing them to incriminate themselves is a tricky and unsettled question of law that we (the Yanks) are still working on.

What if your password is "IkilledmywifewithabigwrenchthatIhaveburiedundertherosebushesatmyformeraddress" ?

Re:Giving up passwords

[tsotha]

I don't see any reason to believe this is true either in general or in this particular case, as the court rulings seem pretty logical. The government has always been able to go through your stuff with a warrant - prosecutors need this power to do their job. If, for example, the court knows you've hidden a document the cops can't find, the judge can compel you to produce the document, and throw you in jail until you do. How is that different?

This is not a question of courts removing rights you used to have. It's a question of you assuming (erroneously) because the government didn't used to do something it didn't have the power to do that thing.

Full Disk Encryption Hard For Law Enforcement To C

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit, Sherlock...

I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[tiffany352]

My /home partition is encrypted with a 27 character password. I've felt like it's not enough for a while enough, but apparently the police are a lot clumsier than I give them credit for. (I'm not a criminal or anything, it's just that I'm paranoid.) (If anyone knows of a utility that will clear my RAM on shutdown, I'd appreciate it...)

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

Your RAM will clear itself on shutdown just fine. The spooks aren't that good...

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[sydneyfong]

I'd gladly sell you a $100000 placebo utility to clear your RAM on shutdown....

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[tiffany352]

I forgot where, but I had heard DDR3 RAM will last over an hour and still retain 99% of its data (although it'll be completely inverted after a certain time). I suspected something similar for DDR2 (which I have).

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[s0litaire]

Best way to clear RAM is either C4 or Thermite ^_^
Or just before shutdown run "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mem" (can't remember the actual location of memory in /dev/ but ram is a good place holder)

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[s0litaire]

RAM can hold a copy of the last data held for a good 5 seconds if warm and up to +20mins of frozen,
so it could be chilled/frozen using compressed air, removed and placed into a reader that dumps the ram memory to disk.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[RoFLKOPTr]

I forgot where, but I had heard DDR3 RAM will last over an hour and still retain 99% of its data (although it'll be completely inverted after a certain time). I suspected something similar for DDR2 (which I have).

Whoever told you that was completely incorrect. DRAM capacitors discharge fully within one second of power loss.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[tiffany352]

Oh, this seems interesting. Stuff your computer with semtex and booby trap the case. :D Although, upgrades would be a major pain. :P

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

There are ways around that: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/halderman/halderman_html/index.html

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

Your RAM already clears on shutdown... It's freaking RAM.
However if you would want to attempt to wipe the RAM without turning off the machine there are for some ungodly reason tools for that.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/en/man1/smem.1.html

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Z00L00K]

But you still need to know what to look for in those memory modules.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[MaskedSlacker]

Although, upgrades would be a major pain.

I don't think you'd feel anything at all, actually.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[mikael]

I remember there was this trick with some 8-bit computers. There was a special cold-boot mode, where if you held down some keys on the keyboard during power-on, system memory wouldn't be cleared. You could see that RAM memory did partially retain its state between power-on and offs.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

"What did I forget to tell the GeekSquad guy????? Hmmmmm." As he drives away from Best Buy.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the state of LE digital forensics, only a very few federal police forces in the world have access to the expertise and equipment to do this practically and even then, the only situation I'd imagine this would occur would be the imminent risk of a terrorist attack.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Bengie]

A 12-18char password is just fine. Once you get past the "thousands of millenia" part, extra length becomes moot.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Kjella]

Well, pretty soon DRM will come to the rescue because Hollywood has been afraid of tools that will read their encryption keys directly from memory. Pretty sure we'll see fully encrypted RAM before they're happy. Until then, you might want a sensor that cuts power when they enter the house/apartment.

Re:I have my disk (at least partially) encrypted

[Rakishi]

If they know they need to look in ram then your house probably has more bugs in it than an inner city motel. Including a half dozen on your computer of one kind or another. And probably inside your toilet.

So in the end they don't even need to look in ram since they know everything already.

Backdoors?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the encryption should be absolutely safe, there has to be open source software, to be 100% sure that there is no back door. Or is every encryption technology reverse engineered to be able to say that no government idiot can type some cheat and decrypt all the data?

Re:Backdoors?

[Smallpond]

If the encryption should be absolutely safe, there has to be open source software, to be 100% sure that there is no back door. Or is every encryption technology reverse engineered to be able to say that no government idiot can type some cheat and decrypt all the data?

No amount of reverse engineering can prove that software does not have a backdoor. You can never be sure unless you write all of your tools yourself.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Re:Full Disk Encryption Hard For Law Enforcement T

[Yvan256]

Still a better title than "Full Disk Encryption Hard For Law Enforcement To Cocaine".

Anti-FUD

[spudnic]

So how are we to know that this isn't anti-FUD?

"Yes, Citizen, your full disk encryption is just too much for us to crack. I guess you're in the clear."

Re:Anti-FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

By the physics of it. It takes x time to check a key so an alphanumeric password of length n will take x*(36^n) to crack. If the password is long enough it'll take an obscene amount of time to crack.

Re:Anti-FUD

[dr2chase]

And no deal was done with the manufacturer to install a backdoor?

Re:Anti-FUD

[klingens]

Easy: either they consistently have the data from the decrypted drives and use it to prosecute you or they don't. If they lie to the courts about having the data, ie they have it and use it secretly but don't tell the judge and defense, then you have bigger problems: a corrupt justice system. Then encrypted data won't help you to avoid a guilty verdict.

Re:Anti-FUD

[SuperMog2002]

And out of the dozens of manufacturers (including some open source), none of them leaked anything to the press about said deals?

Re:Anti-FUD

[betterunixthanunix]

That is not how the police in America work. When they cannot crack a cryptosystem, they try to get it outlawed or prevent it from becoming mainstream, and then push for a system with a backdoor. When they manage to crack a system e.g. the Hushmail attack, they parade it around and declare that no matter what anyone does the police will be able to defeat it.

If this sounds like Doublethink to you, perhaps you should take a look around and reconsider your views on whether it was Orwell or Huxley who was correct.

Re:Anti-FUD

[Z00L00K]

Just make sure that the obscene amount of time exceeds the statute of limitation.

Re:Anti-FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I would actually be surprised if the military didn't have a massive supercomputer specifically for this purpose able to bruteforce an insane number of passwords per second. I seem to remember years ago a nuclear weapons smuggler had sat 4 years in prison before his passwords were finally cracked.

The thing is, similarly to during the Cold War, sometimes you have intelligence assets that, if you use them, would cause them to lose their value for the future. That's because the Bad Guys (in this connection yourself) would adjust their behaviour. There's no way to "secretly" crack your everyday bloke's password (or even the worst child porn offender's password) and use it in a trial without that becoming known.

Hence, as long as you aren't smuggling nuclear missile blueprints, you can do pretty much anything involving regular criminal courts and not be cracked. Even if the government has that capability the whole time.

Re:Anti-FUD

[thegarbz]

Because my tinfoil hat doesn't work at that frequency.

Best erase my harddrive and then write /dev/urandom out to it 37 times just to be sure.

Re:Anti-FUD

[colinrichardday]

Shouldn't that be x*(62^n)? Don't people use case-sensitive passwords any more?

Re:Anti-FUD

[0123456]

I would actually be surprised if the military didn't have a massive supercomputer specifically for this purpose able to bruteforce an insane number of passwords per second

The entire US defence budget since the beginning of time couldn't build a machine powerful enough to brute-force a 256-bit key before the United States ceases to exist.

Well, other than pure luck because you chose all zeros as your key.

Re:Anti-FUD

[bagofbeans]

Hundreds of thousands of US servicepeople had access to the stuff put on wikileaks (network was open to every grade), but only one leaked it.

So, yes, open secrets can be kept.

Re:Anti-FUD

[chill]

Buy a copy of EnCase and try it yourself. The various law enforcement agencies are some of the biggest customers.

While there is always speculation that the NSA can do this. I can guarantee you if they can, they aren't going to share with the local cops. Hell, they probably won't share with the FBI, either. They won't take the chance of some flatfoot letting the cat out of the bag.

Re:Anti-FUD

[CodeBuster]

they try to get it outlawed or prevent it from becoming mainstream

It's already too late for that now.

Re:Anti-FUD

[betterunixthanunix]

Really? Encryption is mainstream? I have not observed that, in fact, people give me weird looks when I say that I use whole disk encryption, when I ask them to enable OTR, and when I suggest that maintaining a PGP key is worth their time.

Re:Anti-FUD

[AHuxley]

The US and UK sold unsafe encryption for years to their friends and allies around the world.
It was great over long distances, but up close (in room range for some extra US/UK hardware) leaked clear text.
Or they got to the company making the product or set encryption levels for an industry sector ..

Re:Anti-FUD

[germansausage]

We are a mid-sized plain vanilla type engineering and tech company and all our work laptops are issued with full disk encryption. It's no big deal, just one more password when you log on. It seems common enough and no big problem to implement or manage.

Re:Anti-FUD

[Bengie]

The other problem to that is USA law also requires communication of sensitive data to be encrypted, which requires open access to encryption standards.

Re:Anti-FUD

[CodeReign]

just one more password

Clearly you don't actually work with real people. Nobody at any IT job I've worked with will go past 2 passwords without giving hours of grief.

Re:Anti-FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly mainstream for many companies. My company has approximately 80,000 employees, each one with a laptop, and all those laptops (in theory at least) are compulsorily full disk encrypted with PGP. Same for all 'official' USB memory sticks, external drives, optical media etc.

Re:Anti-FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why assume law enforcement is the source of this anti-FUD? It could be a plant from, say, an "intelligence" agency. Just because it might aid law enforcement doesn't mean it originated there.

Re:Anti-FUD

[Coren22]

What about the extended character set? Insert Russian, Arabic, whatever into your password and make it really hard :)

Re:Anti-FUD

[colinrichardday]

I don't how well I could memorize a Russian password.

xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Xkcd "comics" (I'm very hesitant to actually call them that) are never obligatory. In fact, we're all better off if you don't link to them. They just plain aren't funny or amusing or insightful, regardless of what your taste in humor is.

Many of them just make a semi-obscure academic, scientific or Internet cultural reference. There's not even any commentary, implied or expressed, about the thing or idea being referenced! The comic just makes the reference, and somehow that's supposed to be comical. Well, it isn't.

Many of the rest just rip off jokes or witty observations that have been floating around labs, colleges, and other academic or scientific institutions for decades now. They are not original in any way.

There are many truly funny web comics out there, written by very bright people who combine intellect and artistic skill in a remarkable way. Link to them instead of xkcd. Xkcd "comics" just aren't worthy of being viewed.

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[roc97007]

Well, thank YOU mister frowny-face!

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[metacell]

I'm sure he just needs a hug.

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Did a stick figure run over your dog or something?

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[cusco]

Since he still hasn't figured out how to create an account and log in yet he probably really doesn't understand half of xkcd so thinks it's dumb.

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[sco08y]

There are many truly funny web comics out there, written by very bright people who combine intellect and artistic skill in a remarkable way.

Yeah, and why ride horses when there are all those unicorns?

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Xkcd "comics" (I'm very hesitant to actually call them that) are never obligatory. In fact, we're all better off if you don't link to them. They just plain aren't funny or amusing or insightful, regardless of what your taste in humor is.

True of 99% of them. But this one is actually funny. And now we'll all know something more that you don't. More fool you.

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Did a stick figure run over your dog or something?

No, his girlfriend left him for a stick figure. She wanted to try a bigger penis.

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like you. A XKCD-zombie always posts this shitty comic whenever encryption is mentioned, and without exception it's modded up by a horde of mindless drones. I really liked XKCD in the beginning but after Randall discovered 4chan he ruined it (to be fair, this might not be 4chan's fault but the efame getting to his head) - every "joke" is either a meme, about sex or criticizes something by using a strawman (I'm sure someone will find one comic that miraculously manages to be funny, congrats, I didn't expect less of you zombies, always ready to defend Randall's honor).

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[roc97007]

Yep, cusco was right.

He hasn't heard of cookies or persistent sessions either.

Re:xkcd "comics" are never obligatory.

[crdotson]

While I'm sure everyone here appreciates having a troll tell us what is funny, fuck you. If you were worth the bother, I would find and post an apropos xkcd link.

So what? Even our goons can do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The encryption might be practically unbreakable but that doesn't help a lot. Around here police just break into homes to install hardware or software keyloggers. Sure, that may not be exactly legal for them to do, but they don't care because they know nothing will happen to them.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[Lehk228]

software keyloggers will not work if you use full disk encryption and hardware keyloggers require that they correctly guess which keyboard you are using (if you are paranoid enough about the government getting into your computer you should have a usb keyboard hidden somewhere and not actually use the one on your desk to log in

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[CodeBuster]

(if you are paranoid enough about the government getting into your computer you should have a usb keyboard hidden somewhere and not actually use the one on your desk to log in

How can you be sure that they haven't opened the computer and installed the keylogger in such a way that any keyboard used with the computer will be logged? If the computer has ever been outside of your custody for any significant length of time, it's suspect. Practically speaking, this level of custody can really only be achieved with a mobile computing device, something small enough to be carried at all times and concealed.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[Lehk228]

doing that without access to the OS would be either quite a trick or a huge mess of wires running to every USB header on the board and even that would not work if a ps/2 keyboard was used

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[SJ2000]

One of the most common methods LE use to bypass full disk encryption is social engineering a user/administrator to run malware on the system while it's running. Full Disk Encryption doesn't make your system magically invulnerable to malware.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[SJ2000]

PS/2 keyboards are especially vulnerable to passive interception attacks. Proof of concept of electromagnetic emanations interception and intercepting via ground leakage or laser microphones.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

People may check the connectors of their keyboards but they never check the accurate length of the cable. With standardised connections it's all about cutting off the original connector and replacing it with one of the same type but with logging gear hidden within it. If you provide the connector casing, you can get a custom one built for around ~$400.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[randyleepublic]

That's what video surveillance is to prevent. They can break in and install keyloggers, but you'll know it and remove them.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except perhaps suffication due to tripping a security alarm when breaking in that releases CO2. Security and firesuppression control systems are often the same system and a fault in software could be blamed for the death of the intruder.

Re:So what? Even our goons can do it.

[Rakishi]

Then you get charged with murder due to setting up such an inherently unsafe system. Enjoy prison.

It depends on who your adversary is

[Anonymous Coward]

If you attract the interest of a sophisticated enough adversary, the FBI or NSA for instance, you're probably toast. And if your adversary isn't concerned with following the law, well your fingers (or the fingers of your family members) can be lopped off one at a time until you remember your passphrase. Plausible deniability is a better strategy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9741357-7.html

Re:It depends on who your adversary is

[Anonymous Coward]

Plausible deniability is not better for keeping your fingers. And up against sophisticated adversaries you need TEMPEST secured hardware at the very minimum, little can be done about bugs, laser mikes, spy cams and other side channel attacks.

Re:It depends on who your adversary is

[couchslug]

"If you attract the interest of a sophisticated enough adversary, the FBI or NSA for instance, you're probably toast."

The FBI and NSA are our friends, so consider the following instructions to be for use in Syria and Iran.

The only reason to hide stuff from the government is if you are "doing something they don't like" which they will incarcerate or kill you for.

If you are a serious person, you are willing to use violence because anything less is being a poser. After you take out the arresting Baathists/Jihadists with a worn IED, ensure your data is also a nice gift.

Want your data destroyed along with the asshole trying to take it?
A 3.5" drive case has enough room for a reasonable amount of gunpowder or other explosive along with an e-match (easy to make) or other initiator. Put a flash drive inside the 3.5" case to store your encrypted info, and use the rest of the space appropriately. I'll leave any interface connectors up to you, but save the power Molex for the e-match/detonator. With any luck your Secret Police tech will dead, blind and/or be typing with stubs, and since you were doomed anyway you at least damaged their ability to mess with the next guy.

Got a better idea

[Zandamesh]

Encrypt the ram as well :p

kind of the point

[Surt]

I mean ... what's the point of encryption that your foes, police or otherwise, can bypass?

One quantum computer, to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be easy for a 256-qubit quantum computer.
Now if I only knew how to make one.

Semi-unrelated: Easy to remember good passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Any simple phrase that's memorable to you with a minor variation in caps and 2-3 symbols. Like:

ItWasADark&AndstormYnigh%T! (or preferably something that's not a top-10 cliche).

Not very much less secure than a completely random phrase. The only way to brute-force it would be to take every potentially memorable phrase from every work of literature, try every cap combination and every placement of 2-3 random symbols, which is still impossibly hard. It is FAR, FAR better to use a long phrase like that than a short phrase of extremely random symbols.

What about

[Anonymous Coward]

What about a "password" that you tell police that then deletes everything in the encrypted space. So you have two passwords, one to decrypt everything for you and one that you give away when needed to delete everything but make it look like it isn't.

Lets say "impossible" instead of "hard"

[gweihir]

Unless the people using it are doing stupid things, like letting a running or hibernating laptop fall into the hands of law enforcement or using weak passwords. There are plenty of people that do these stupid things though, but getting a memory-image via FireWire or brute-forcing a weak password hardly counts as breaking the encryption. Hardware keyboard-sniffer also do not count. AFAIK there is not a single instance where law enforcement managed to break FDE when the user did not do stupid things.

Re:Lets say "impossible" instead of "hard"

[blueg3]

User or manufacturer. FDE has been broken when it's implemented as on-disk encryption and the manufacturer either implemented poor encryption (while labeling it otherwise) or had a "backup" key.

Re:Lets say "impossible" instead of "hard"

[gweihir]

Both do not count as "breaking the encryption". And there is a way out: Use open-source encryption.

REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are in violation of the laws forbidding the manufacture, sale and possession of chilled prawnography.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[ColdWetDog]

You are in violation of the laws forbidding the manufacture, sale and possession of chilled prawnography.

A good strong shell ought to keep him out of trouble. Don't Bash it if you've not tried it.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously using the same web scraper software that Warner Bros relies upon to provide rock solid evidence for it's legal proceedings?!?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/warner-admits-it-issues-takedowns-for-files-it-hasnt-looked-at.ars
Warner Bros: we issued takedowns for files we never saw, didn't own copyright to

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[neokushan]

How long have you been waiting to use that one?

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[MarkRose]

That was a bad pun... tsch tsch.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

You are in violation of the laws forbidding the manufacture, sale and possession of chilled prawnography.

A good strong shell ought to keep him out of trouble. Don't Bash it if you've not tried it.

I don't understand. Should he tcsh it?

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[chromas]

Judging by his name, I'd say he's been out there a while.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[einhverfr]

Indeed, a c shell might be more available in this case.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Nethead]

Surely you meant: tcsh tcsh.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[darthdavid]

All the puns are REPLent...

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[einhverfr]

Like casing perls before swine, right?

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vice is nice but insect is best

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Meski]

Damn. You've just given me an irresistible urge to consume garlic prawnography.

Re:REFRIGERATED crustacean pix?

[Anonymous Coward]

samefag detected

Deniable encryption only works in theory

[betterunixthanunix]

In practice, the headaches that would ensue from widespread use of deniable encryption would cause one of two outcomes:

1. Police would stop asking for secret keys, or only ask for a short period of time, because they would have no way of knowing whether or not they have the true secret.
2. The system would be outlawed.

Countries that respect and protect a right to free speech would not outlaw such a system, but unfortunately such countries are few and far between. Deniable encryption encryption works in theory, but in practice the existence of non-deniable encryption makes it hard for people to claim that they are innocent users of a deniable encryption system. While there are innocent uses of such a system (perhaps your business secrets are so valuable that being tortured for them is not beyond the realm of possibility) they are few and far between; deniable encryption is tool for protecting your data from a government, and for all their talk about China and Iran, most western governments are not interested in having citizens who can secure their communications and data from police investigations.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[izomiac]

I figured that plausible deniability applies both ways. You deny that you have any more hidden volumes, they deny that you've given them all relevant passwords. In the UK that means running afoul of that law. In less kind parts of the world (or society) that means you will be tortured until you give up the "real" password, repeated ad infinitum as there's no way to determine the number of hidden volumes. Sucks to be you if what they're looking for doesn't exist, there's no way for you to prove that and break the cycle.

IMHO, plausibly deniability is for reasonable and less motivated opponents (e.g. some family members). If you're worried about a less savory type, you need to visibly destroy the data. E.g., put it on RAM disks that will shut down if someone opens your closet door and doesn't type the correct code in 30 seconds. You'll be charged with destruction of evidence in a courtroom, and presumed guilty elsewhere, but it's a calculated risk. Wiping the header that is used to convert your password into the actual crypto key is another possibility that potentially allows for later recovery, but your opponent may assume that as well.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Hentes]

Steganography would still work.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that like deniable encryption, steganography may simply be outlawed and the existence of steganography software on your computer could become a crime in itself. As with deniable encryption, when the police see that you have steganography software on your computer, they may simply question / torture you until you tell them where the data is hidden. Steganography is somewhat better than deniable encryption because the cover traffic can be designed to not arouse any suspicions, but if you are already at the point of being questioned by the police it does not help much.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Hentes]

Steganography software does not need to be on your computer, it can be on a web service. Also, encryption itself is not outlawed in most places (this would make everyone a criminal who visits a https site for example), you just have to hand over the password if asked. Now hidden drives can be found by scanning the hard drive, but steganography can't.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[betterunixthanunix]

Steganography software does not need to be on your computer, it can be on a web service

...which fails for disc encryption for obvious reasons.

That aside, if the web service is illegal, you have the same problem as before: you need to somehow connect to an illegal website without getting caught by the police. Tor does a reasonable job at this, but a country that makes steganography illegal would certainly make Tor illegal as well. Tor does a good job of disguising itself as a typical TLS connection, but it is nowhere near good enough -- on several occasions nations have been able to block all Tor traffic by distinguishing that traffic from a standard TLS connection. The existence of Tor on your computer may also be incriminating in some places.

Now hidden drives can be found by scanning the hard drive, but steganography can't.

Actually, a strong deniable encryption system will not reveal whether or not the ciphertext can be decrypted to additional messages. The problem is not that the police can scan a drive and detect a hidden partition, it is that they can simply see that your bootloader supports a deniable WDE system. Steganography does not help here either: the police will turn on your computer and see that you have a bootloader that supports steganography.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says truecrypt won't come out with a version where the hidden partition is steganographically hidden in the free space of a non-encrypted FAT partition? Outcome #3.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

What you really need is a battery powered usb dongle that has a 128 bit counter. When its plugged into your computer, the counter stops (mechanical or electro-mechanical switch). When its unplugged, it starts counting again. Keep a tight lanyard attached to it, and the wall. If your computer is moved, it pulls out. Your filesystem reads the counter once at boot and stores it, and uses the number as a one-time pad to your filesystem. Someone moves your computer and all data is lost. Make it difficult to see the dongle/lanyard. They pull out your computer, and you can tell them about the dongle, the number and all the rest in the name of security. You held nothing back, you were forthright and honest. Its up to them to break the 128 bit key sequence. Oh, make the dongle pre-settable so that there is a large 128 bit number loaded into it when it starts so that they aren't starting at 0 and taking only a few minutes to break it. Make sure the dongle has a 1 MHz clock, so even a few seconds unplugged will change the number by millions of digits. By the time they ask, plug the dongle in and read it, perhaps hours will have lapsed, thats 3.6 billion digits per hour, have fun!

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Chris Mattern]

there's no way to determine the number of hidden volumes.

Am I missing something here? The physical disk has a known, fixed size. When the size of all the volumes you have discovered (including their free space) add up to the size of the physical disk, you've found everything.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Truecrypt fills the volume with encrypted random data. How do you differentiate between a hidden volume and random data?

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[networkBoy]

the outer volume, when mounted in "unsafe" mode uses the entire disk partition, thus there are three ways to log into a TC volume with a hidden partition:

Into hidden volume, with hidden password: see hidden volume, outer volume as unavailable.
into outer volume, with both outer and hidden password: outer volume mounts, hidden volume shows as unavailable.
into outer volume, with outer password only: outer volume mounts entire space as one volume, all space available, contents of hidden volume may be overwritten, but all space appears consumed.

in practice to make the outer volume look valid you should place sensitive info there:
tax returns for clients if you are a CPA (while the cooked books are on the hidden volume).
"normal" porn if you are a married person (while the CP is on the hidden volume).
company confidential design docs if you are an engineer (while the hidden volume contains competitor trade secret info).
etc.
The point being that you should make the outer volume both useful and not small so that it will have data churn.

Also, to defeat casual perusal of your filesystem by random people who may access your computer I am fond of storing my truecrypt volumes as alternate data streams/metadata to normal files. I have a 500 gig drive with a single mp3 on it that is only 3 min long, yet the disk is full :)
-nB

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[AHuxley]

Re: How do you differentiate between a hidden volume and random data
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/04/11/tchunt-search-for-truecrypt-volumes/

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[jbolden]

Given that there are several open source implementations I'm not sure how effective outlawing them would be. Especially since it is easy enough to use them with a regular file system and just embedding the secondary encrypted file inside another file.

I've already seen this for email where an email folder is encrypted with part of the password stored in a gif. The end user has to select the right gif, the program doesn't know.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[betterunixthanunix]

Given that there are several open source implementations I'm not sure how effective outlawing them would be

Keep in mind that the point of deniable encryption is to allow you to prove your innocence -- so if using deniable encryption is a crime in itself, the entire point is defeated. It does not matter where the key is hidden, it does not matter how theoretically strong the deniability is.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that if you have a disk with a TrueCrypt volume and a hidden volume, when you provide the password for the non-hidden volume, the hidden volume appears as free space on the disk. Since free space in TrueCrypt volumes that do not have a hidden volume is initialized as random gibberish with the same statistical properties that a hidden volume would have, plausible deniability is preserved. Your adversary can't tell whether all that free space in your encrypted volume is really free space, or actually a hidden volume. They can write into the free space, which would destroy the data in the hidden volume, but if they have your disk, they can already destroy all of the data on it.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the comments, it doesn't work particularly well.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[plover]

That only shows you a particular file probably contains a truecrypt volume. The magic of truecrypt is that the unused bytes of the partition are either random data or not.

Say you have a 10GB truecrypt file. If you use the right password, you mount a new partition, and it shows 6GB of files on a 10GB volume. What's in the other 4GB? Is it another encrypted truecrypt filesystem? Is it random data? Don't know, can't tell.

Let's say you have a second truecrypt volume in the random data, with a second super-secret password. Type in the right password, and your 4GB volume appears with 3GB of super secret data. What's in the last 1GB? Don't know, can't tell.

As a suspect being investigated, even if they beat you with rubber hoses, you can tell them there's no more data hidden in the 1GB of free space, that there's not a third volume. But you can't prove it to them.

Of course, this comes with a price. If you are working in the 6GB volume and add more data, it overwrites some of the random data in the remaining 4GB. Did it overwrite your super secret 3GB volume? Well, where else is it going to go? You only find out after entering the super secret password and seeing if your 3GB volume is intact. Truecrypt itself doesn't know if you're using the random data.

That's what's meant by deniable encryption.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Any amount of free space could potentially contain an additional hidden volume.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[DarwinSurvivor]

Steganography software does not need to be on your computer, it can be on a web service.

So we should take our data that is secret enough to require deniable stenographic encryption and transmit it to some web service for encryption/decryption??

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Linsaran]

Essentially the way true crypt handles hidden volumes is thus. It creates a container volume, of a size you specify. Using a key you specify. When you input that key you open that container volume, and you can fill it up with whatever you want, lolcats, prawnography whatever. You set the size of your container volume, let's say for example at 20gb

Now you also create a 'hidden volume' inside that container. The hidden volume is designed to occupy the free space in the volume and it is obviously created to be smaller than the container volume. For our example, we'll say the hidden volume is 15gb.

The hidden volume uses a different encryption key. There's no way since the container is already encrypted (causing all the free space to essentially look like random garbage) to tell that there's a hidden volume contained within the free space of the volume, unless you know the key to decrypt it.

I'm over simplifying it a bit but that's the jist of how a hidden container works. And since we know that the hidden volume is 15gb, that leaves us 5 gb on the container volume to fill up with stuff you want people to think you care about keeping secret but don't really. The container file will report that it has 20gb total storage space to the system and anyone looking at it, but you'll actually only have 5gb of space to work with because if you put more than that in you'll corrupt your hidden volume by overwriting the 'free space' at the end of the container.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative use of steganography can muddle that though. Which means that in certain instances your 1 bits and 0 bits from different volumes may overlap. Whether or not something like that is actually used is another question though.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

there's no way to determine the number of hidden volumes.

Am I missing something here? The physical disk has a known, fixed size. When the size of all the volumes you have discovered (including their free space) add up to the size of the physical disk, you've found everything.

Yes. Compression.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Hentes]

You can encrypt it before as much as you like.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are missing something. Volumes can be stored inside volumes, masquerading as large files, to any level of nesting.

It's really cool!

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[jbolden]

I get that. The whole point plausibly deniable encryption is that you can deny having encrypted data. The encrypted data is hidden in something else or hidden in some way. There will be no evidence of using deniable encryption.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[betterunixthanunix]

There will be no evidence of using deniable encryption.

Other than the software on your computer?

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Lennie]

I've seen a demonstration on TV, where the authorities attach a device to the computer which keeps the screensaver/login from appearing (and locking the console with a password) and attaching a UPS and moving the power for the machine from the wall socket to the UPS without powering it down.

Depending on loss-of-power to wipe your data is probably not such a great idea.

Maybe 30 seconds is enough.

Although I've also heared it is sometimes possible to recover parts of the memory after a cold restart.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Lennie]

I was also thinking of storing data in alternate data streams/meta data. I was thinking of all those new .docx and .odt files, they are actually zipfiles.

Someone can probably come up with something smart there too.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Lennie]

Do it in the browser, by downloading the code from the webservice and deleting it from the cache/history again ?

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[jbolden]

Sure. But there are huge numbers of apps and especially utilities on any computer that don't get used. I would gather than most PCs or Macs loaded with software, i.e. the kinds of computers that would be in question have upward of 30k executables. Even programmers probably only know a small percentage. The point of open source would be to compile this encryption software into dozens or hundreds of other applications widely used.

Further if it were illegal the code itself may night be on the computer but on a FOB, like a USB key.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[betterunixthanunix]

The point of open source would be to compile this encryption software into dozens or hundreds of other applications widely used.

That worked for public key encryption because there was a strong business need for it, which was justifiable within just about any sensible legal framework. There really are criminals who would sniff packets and commit credit card fraud with the information they gathered if those connections were not encrypted. The risk is real for large numbers of people and businesses, and so SSL/TLS is built into commonly used PC software and the push against public key cryptography was a failure. Authoritarian governments recognized the economic importance of public key encryption and they allow it, but people can be required to surrender private keys on demand.

When it comes to deniable encryption, it is much harder to argue that there is an economic need for it. Most people and "legitimate" businesses are not at risk of being tortured by criminals for their secret keys, and that includes businesses with highly valuable secrets. Even in cases where there is a real risk of being tortured for a secret key, the utility of deniable encryption is questionable -- do you think a Mexican drug cartel is going to stop torturing a suspected informant just because they were given an innocent key?

The principle use of deniable encryption is to fight back against key disclosure laws -- to fight the government. Why would Microsoft or Apple want to ship products that help people fight back against their governments? Even in the United States (where there are no key disclosure laws) Microsoft and Apple have no reason to provoke the government by shipping strong steganography or deniable encryption products.

Further if it were illegal the code itself may night be on the computer but on a FOB, like a USB key.

That is not going to be feasible for the majority of people. You are talking about hiding the software outside of your home (do you think the police do not know how to find a thumb drive you hid in a vent?), secretly retrieving it when you need to send a secret message, and then hiding the drive again. That might be something a secret agent is willing to do, but that is far beyond the bounds of what can be reasonably expected of journalists or human rights activists, let alone common citizens.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[jbolden]

Good point about the FOB and the economics. I should comment though in the early 1990s the arguments regarding encryption were similar and at the time business wasn't terribly interested. It is hard to figure out why business would want plausibly deniable encryption though.

You do have a point. If the software isn't at least semi ubiquitous, and having such software is evidence of guilt....

____

Let me throw one more at you. The hiding of critical information inside other files. Like embedding an encrypted word doc in a movie. That software doesn't exist yet (because CPUs aren't fast enough) but the static versions already exist. And that kind of plausibly deniable encryption could work over the web.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[wwphx]

Steganography can be detected because the documents that contain such hidden data do not compress as well as documents not containing such data. That doesn't help you get the contents, but it can tell you that something is lurking within.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Hentes]

How well documents compress has quite a big random factor in it.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[wwphx]

Absolutely. But statistically over a decent sample of stega vs non-stega docs, you see a difference. And if they can get ahold of a copy of the source document or image that compresses significantly differently, they then have an argument that steganography is present.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Hentes]

True, but wouldn't it be possible to alter some other parts of the document to compress better, thus negating the effect? Of course, if they have a version of the original you are likely to be screwed anyway.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

the police will turn on your computer and see that you have a bootloader that supports steganography.

I've been exposed to actual real life law enforcement, and I can tell you in addition to my hard drives they seized my microwave. That they would even be aware of the concept of a 'bootloader' is quite unlikely.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[wwphx]

Good question. I don't think that would work. My knowledge of how steganographic messages are coded is rather stale, but as I recall it uses bits that are otherwise unused in (for example) an image. So after encoding the appearance of the image is unaffected, but with the alteration of the bits the compression is reduced. Altering the image still means that the unused bits are unused, and I would assume that altering the image, say, in Photoshop, after encoding I would think would make the message irretrievable.

I'm not sure how it would work against, say, a Word document or PDF.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[AmiMoJo]

"normal" porn if you are a married person (while the CP is on the hidden volume).

I had to stop and think about what CP stood for there. The mere fact that you abbreviated it could be used against you. Not that I am suggesting you are anything other than completely innocent, but the law in the UK only requires that the police show some suspicion that you might have more data you are not giving up for a prosecution under RIPA (oops...)

This is the central problem. Those writing the laws realised that encryption is deniable and there is nothing they can do about that so made a law that basically says all they need in innuendo to send you to jail for two years and there is nothing you can do to prove otherwise. They shifted the burden of proof to the accused. Could be interesting if someone emailed a high ranking politician a file full of random bytes accompanied by "found some new CP, usual password"...

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[AmiMoJo]

Steganography software does not need to be on your computer, it can be on a web service

In the UK the domain name of every site you visit and the times you visited at are logged by law, and Google will hand over your search history on request.

The thing is everyone uses encryption, everyone has things to hide (unless you prefer your bank statements sent on the back of a post card...) so having encryption software on your PC is no more suspicious than having envelopes in a desk drawer or locks on your doors. The problem is that you have to convince a jury of that in the face of the dubious experts that the CPS will call to say otherwise. The same thing happens regularly with fingerprints. Fingerprint matching is an art, the match is never perfect like on CSI and different people will give you different interpretations. DNA and specks of explosives/drugs/blood are in the same category, but at your trial it really depends on the quality of your defence and your ability to gather expert witnesses of your own.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Hentes]

I don't know that much about it either but from my experiences with photography digital cameras could provide a good alibi. If you use a high iso speed with a digital camera, the picture will capture static noise, that is mostly random. So you could just grab a picture, hide your data in it, which will make it a little noisy but you can blame it on the static.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[rtb61]

Sounds all like to much of a hassle when you get thumbnail size storage that holds gigabytes and is so easy to hide or even swallow, why bother. Just how many secrets do you guys have or is it just paranoid much. Don't forget you just want to keep private your data not your applications.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I figured that plausible deniability applies both ways. You deny that you have any more hidden volumes, they deny that you've given them all relevant passwords. In the UK that means running afoul of that law.

They can't just say "You've not given us a password, therefore you are guilty". They still have to prove a jury beyond reasonably doubt that you have an encryption to give up. "You were lugging around a laptop with a harddisk full of random data, apart from a header block from a well know disk encryption software" is almost certainly going to convince them. Just saying "We want more passwords" with no other eviedence probably won't.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[networkBoy]

Not keeping your applications private (actually the windows registry, Mac equivalent) is a real problem because both these systems store lots of file data not actually with the file.

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[networkBoy]

I picked it up here on /. as an abbreviation and given the sensitivity of the topic I don't like typing it in longform in my posts (especially if I am going through the office proxy server).

Re:Deniable encryption only works in theory

[AmiMoJo]

Sure, and I'm not accusing you of anything, merely pointing out that it could easily be twisted against you. The laws says that the police have to show some evidence that you might have illegal material in encrypted files, which is pretty easy when you can sift through every random forum post or email they ever wrote.

Maybe they could try some real police work

[Anonymous Coward]

What goes on inside a personal computer is rarely the illegal part, it's usually just going to be evidence of something illegal that happened outside of the computer. I think the effort would be better spent on finding the illegal act instead of hoping that Joe Terrorist happened to send an email to his mom about the bomb he's building.

Re:Maybe they could try some real police work

[0123456]

I think the effort would be better spent on finding the illegal act instead of hoping that Joe Terrorist happened to send an email to his mom about the bomb he's building.

But real criminals may shoot you, whereas people downloading MP3s or movie torrents rarely do.

Research is needed to...

[Psicopatico]

"Research is needed to develop new techniques and technology for breaking or bypassing full disk encryption."

Fine. Go ahead.
That would lead to "better" crypto systems.

Not so simple

[betterunixthanunix]

As I understand the case law (IANAL), the following has been held by the courts:

1. A defendant who consented to a search of his computer can be compelled to give up his password later even if he does not consent to another search. This is In re Boucher, and it is worth noting that in this situation a deniable encryption system like Truecrypt would not have helped at all.
2. In cases where a defendant's knowledge of a passphrase can be used as evidence that the defendant was in control of a computer that was used to commit crimes, the 5th amendment does apply.
3. In cases where a defendant did not consent to any searches, the defendant cannot be forced to disclose a secret key. This is considered to be equivalent to compelling a defendant to produce incriminating documents, which the Supreme Court found was a violation of 5th amendment rights.

Perhaps a real lawyer should chime in here.

Re:Not so simple

[Deagol]

(IANAL)

Boucher not only consented to a search, he unlocked the drive with the the CP on it for the border/customs agent. This is the unique part of this case that makes it pretty much irrelevant for the generic case. The court ruled (as I understand it) that because he gave up the password once, he had to do it again when asked by the court.

If he had never unlocked the drive to begin with, and kept his mouth shut, then the outcome would have been very different.

Here's a clue LEO guys...

[bmo]

While I currently do not run full disk encryption on my laptop and I have never done anything to warrant arrest, I have thought about full disk encryption. Especially in these days of a growing police state, it is not my job to make your job easier. If the news stories keep going the way they are, I suspect that within the year, I will simply migrate over with strong encryption and that will be that.

Because I do not like the increasingly adversarial and militarized role the police have been taking. I'm sure I'm not alone. While I do not wear tinfoil, the news events of late give me pause.

--
BMO - shiny side out.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[davidwr]

While ... I have never done anything to warrant arrest

...
that you know of.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[shutdown -p now]

Thing is, when it comes to the point of a real police state through and through, you'll be dealing with thermorectal cryptanalysis. I don't think anyone has devised an efficient protection measure against that.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[bmo]

True, and at that point I'll just give up the pw even before we get to the rubber hose decryption.

--
BMO

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[einhverfr]

In a real police state, a right against self-incrimination can be claimed through the use of cyanide capsules.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[CodeBuster]

Indeed. Always remember what Cardinal Richelieu said,

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."

The powerful have always arranged the laws so that troublesome people can be easily suppressed at will. It's basic government 101; control the population through fear of arbitrary arrest and proscription. Don't fool yourself into thinking that this practice doesn't continue into the present day in "free" nations.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I currently do not run full disk encryption on my laptop and I have never done anything to warrant arrest,

--
BMO - shiny side out.

Bull, you just did not know it. Additionally, just because you don't make mistakes does not mean THEY don't make not make mistakes.

http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/19/jury-awards-chicago-family-300000-for-abusive-police-raid-leading-to-shooting-of-family-dog/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/04/21/camden-police-reportedly-fired-over-30-rounds-to-kill-8-month-old-puppy-hitting-homes-and-cars-in-terrified-neighborhood/

I'm sure the two articles above are a bit shrill, and sorry I don't feel like digging for more, but I hope you get the idea. :)

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use full encryption because I can't be 100% sure that there isn't a pornographic image of an underage girl somewhere on my drives. Besides the difficulty of telling the difference between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, only a team of investigators could comprehensively determine what is contained in the TBs of storage I have.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[bill_mcgonigle]

I have never done anything to warrant arrest

You've never been targeted for arrest, you mean. I think the number somebody worked out was that an average person breaks at least 6 laws a day.

If the news stories keep going the way they are, I suspect that within the year, I will simply migrate over with strong encryption and that will be that.

Do it today - you're much more likely to have your machine stolen by [identity] thieves than the Gestapo anyway.

Unless you run Fedora with systemd, which barfs all over a full LUKS setup at boot time, you should be fine.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[mlts]

I use FDE on everything, be it a laptop, server, or desktop. Right now, I'm not worried about police (although with events going on, who knows what might become illegal next. I'm sure there is a bill on someone's desk making it a felony to have media files that are not DRM protected, or stored on a machine/drive with a hardware DRM stack.)

My real worry is the fact that thieves are smart enough that once they get a laptop from the front-line crackheads, they know enough to be able to browse through the machine and/or drives and find usable data that can be used for extortion or blackmail. Laptop thefts are very common, and with this economy, more people are turning to crime to pay the bills.

If a thief steals a laptop [1], proper FDE turns what would be a hardware, data, and license key theft into "just" a hardware theft that insurance will reimburse. If I had business data on the laptop, encrypted, I don't worry... unencrypted, I might have to have to go to the press and tell the world that I let a laptop with confidential data on it get stolen.

[1]: Probably the most secure implementation of FDE I've found is using BitLocker with the TPM chip on, a PIN, and a USB flash drive. If I have the USB flash drive, and my laptop gets stolen, I will be sure the laptop isn't going to be decoded anytime soon. The second most secure is something that uses a cryptographic token like an Aladdin eToken. However, TrueCrypt, LUKS, or FileVault 2 comes very close, assuming one uses a very long passphrase.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[bmo]

>camden

Fortunately I do not live in a third-world hellhole such as that.

Camden is the asshole of NJ.

--
BMO

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

and I have never done anything to warrant arrest

1. You don't need to actually have done anything to be arrested.
2. And that's bullshit anyhow. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, has done something to warrant arrest. For example, in your case, you were being belligerent and refusing to obey commands just now. Oh, you say you were not? Well, that's just more belligerence!

Because I do not like the increasingly adversarial and militarized role the police have been taking. I'm sure I'm not alone. While I do not wear tinfoil, the news events of late give me pause.

Turn on the TV show "Cops" and you'll see rampant abuse of police power, excessive use of force, etc. People applaud it- anything will be allowed as long as they target "Filty, poor, criminals" and leave the "Cleancut, wealthy, upstanding citizens" alone.

Re:Here's a clue LEO guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I do not wear tinfoil...

shiny side out

I find that hard to believe!

Legal

[Anonymous Coward]

It's legal if they have a warrant.

Take some comfort...

[Dogbertius]

It government-backed policing agencies cannot bypass this, at least it shows (to some degree) that AES-256 doesn't have some fundamental flaw or "back-door" in its algorithm that was intentionally left undisclosed. Take some comfort in knowing that everyone who attempts to crack the archive (excluding the use of jail, torture, installing keyloggers, fining you millions in taxes that you never owed, etc) still has to take the brute-force/dictionary-based attacks. Here's an good example:

http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Re:Take some comfort...

[Bengie]

Something is wrong with that page. My password was 12 chars and it claimed it can be cracked in 97,000 years, which averages out to 120bil operations/sec. That's an impressive desktop.

(92^12)/97000/365/24/60/60= ~120,192,006,927

If you don't use the full 92 char list, you'll probably miss one of my chars and never break it.

I've got a solution!

[PopeRatzo]

Use biometrics instead of a password.

Your system unlocks via your foreign friend's iris, which you get via his smartphone's camera.

Now, when the police want to get access to your computer, they have to try to extradite your friend. You can't give them a password because there is no password. The only way to unlock your system is if your friend puts his eye up to his smartphone's camera and you put your smartphone up to your computer's iris scanner. They'd have to figure out a way to compel your friend, who lives in a country that may not have extradition treaty with your particular tyrannical hellhole.

Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but it would be worth it to frustrate the monsters who have seized power.

Of course, by that point they'd probably just use rendition to send you someplace where you'll be tortured, just for making them have to work for a living. US or UK, I don't think there's any line they won't cross. Not any more. There's no longer a pretense to anything like personal rights. Unless your name ends in "Inc." you just don't have rights any more.

Re:I've got a solution!

[davidwr]

Of course, by that point they'd probably just use rendition to send you someplace where you'll be tortured

Rendition by the United States: Places that don't exist that people never come out of.

Rendition by the United Kingdom: No, not the *dramatic pause* COMFY CHAIR! Noooooo......

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

How about build in GPS plus lie detection, and the computer self erases if it's not at home and the user has to convince the computer he is alone and not under police duress to provide the password.

Re:I've got a solution!

[odd42]

Use biometrics instead of a password.

The only way to unlock your system is if your friend puts his eye up to his smartphone's camera and you put your smartphone up to your computer's iris scanner.

Then they would only need a picture of his eye themselves. 20 ways to get that outside of extradition.

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, until they get a photo of your friend off facebook?

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

you're quite stupid.
no explanation neccessary I think.

Re:I've got a solution!

[currently_awake]

The NSA monitors/records all phone traffic so they already have the biometric, or they could send someone to visit him/her and get the pic. I think the only way to protect your data is a thermite charge on the hdd, triggered by tamper sensor, self destruct login, or no valid login within 7 days.

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's almost it. Problem is, if you received his iris image to your smartphone, there may well be a copy of the image stored in flash memory on the phone. Deleted files on flash are almost never erased, unless you fill the memory enough to overwrite them.
Ask your foreign friend to draw and mail to you a QR code using edible ink on rice paper. When the cops come knocking, eat the paper.

Re:I've got a solution!

[CodeBuster]

That isn't necessary. Read up on "plausible deniability" as implemented in TrueCrypt. They've already covered the duress angle.

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything and everything to destroy the rights of the individual while increasing the rights of corporations around the world.

Re:I've got a solution!

[dissy]

Now, when the police want to get access to your computer, they have to try to extradite your friend.

Yeesh! With friends like that, who needs enemies!

At least now I know if someone texts me asking for a close-up image of my eye, I know what you're trying to rope me into ;P

Re:I've got a solution!

[PopeRatzo]

Rendition by the United Kingdom: No, not the *dramatic pause* COMFY CHAIR! Noooooo......

Friend, rendition by the UK means rendition by the US. Why would they bother to have two separate rendition programs? One outsources is to another, who outsources it again.

We wouldn't even know about rendition at all, except for some very sloppy record-keeping and hubris.

Re:I've got a solution!

[PopeRatzo]

you're quite stupid.

You are not the first to have figured this out, friend.

My daughter reminds me on a daily basis, so it's a lesson well-learnt.

Re:I've got a solution!

[PopeRatzo]

The NSA monitors/records all phone traffic so they already have the biometric

So you encrypt the image!

Oh, wait...

Anyway, I'm building a machine I got from a kit purchased online, that uses gears and rotors that I'm going to use to encrypt all my data. I bought it from a Polish website, but the manual is in German..

The website said it was unbreakable.

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

That woudln't work over a smarphone.

Re:I've got a solution!

[WaffleMonster]

Use biometrics instead of a password.

Your system unlocks via your foreign friend's iris, which you get via his smartphone's camera

Horrible advice. Most biometric scanners have lower entropy than a good password.

Proving yourself or people you know/like are tied to a device is also legally a brain dead move.

Re:I've got a solution!

[dynamo]

Unless your name ends in "Inc." you just don't have rights any more.

Damn.. this is so true it hurts.

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use biometrics instead of a password.

Your system unlocks via your foreign friend's iris, which you get via his smartphone's camera.

Now, when the police want to get access to your computer, they have to try to extradite your friend. You can't give them a password because there is no password. The only way to unlock your system is if your friend puts his eye up to his smartphone's camera and you put your smartphone up to your computer's iris scanner. They'd have to figure out a way to compel your friend, who lives in a country that may not have extradition treaty with your particular tyrannical hellhole.

Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but it would be worth it to frustrate the monsters who have seized power.

Of course, by that point they'd probably just use rendition to send you someplace where you'll be tortured, just for making them have to work for a living. US or UK, I don't think there's any line they won't cross. Not any more. There's no longer a pretense to anything like personal rights. Unless your name ends in "Inc." you just don't have rights any more.

Use biometrics instead of a password.

Your system unlocks via your foreign friend's iris, which you get via his smartphone's camera.

Now, when the police want to get access to your computer, they have to try to extradite your friend. You can't give them a password because there is no password. The only way to unlock your system is if your friend puts his eye up to his smartphone's camera and you put your smartphone up to your computer's iris scanner. They'd have to figure out a way to compel your friend, who lives in a country that may not have extradition treaty with your particular tyrannical hellhole.

Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but it would be worth it to frustrate the monsters who have seized power.

Of course, by that point they'd probably just use rendition to send you someplace where you'll be tortured, just for making them have to work for a living. US or UK, I don't think there's any line they won't cross. Not any more. There's no longer a pretense to anything like personal rights. Unless your name ends in "Inc." you just don't have rights any more.

Or calling your friend pretending to be you and simply screen shot the call.

Re:I've got a solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Biometric data is only suitable for authentication, not for generating keying material - in order to provide a consistent result, it cannot provide enough entropy for a secure key. It can simply be brute forced.

Well, there is something to be said for key escrow

[davidwr]

But only when the keyholders are on the same team as you are AND where neither you anyone you care about will never be hurt by them having access to your data.

A common example:

Corporate data encrypted on company-owned computers used by honest employees.

Key escrow protects the company in case the employee gets hit by a car.

Key escrow in this case may be nothing more than the user's passwords written down on a piece of paper locked in a safe in the HR office.

When it comes to governments, which may by definition turn evil in the future if they are not currently evil, the "AND where neither you anyone you care about will never be hurt by them having access to your data" part of the test always fails. Therefore, this argument supporting key escrow in certain situations does not apply when the government may gain access to the keys.

It also doesn't apply when it comes to dishonest employees or employers either.

Full report is available

[cohomology]

For the full report, Google
filetype:pdf "The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics"

Re:Full report is available

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks man. :D

Re:Full report is available

[Smurf]

Cool, thanks! But... that's not the same article. TFA is: "The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics" by Casey, Fellows, Geiger, and Stellatos. The PDF Google links is "The Impact of Full Disk Encryption on Digital Forensics" (note the very small difference in title), by only Casey and Stellatos. Also, the outline of TFA is nothing like the outline of the PDF.

My guess is that the PDF linked by Google is a very early draft of The real FA, and that it morphed considerably before being accepted for publication.

so I can't take your laptop and get customer SSN's

[Joe_Dragon]

so I can't take your laptop and get customer SSN's or other data that others want.

Not impossible, not even hard

[davidwr]

Just practically impossible with current technology.

Within a few years the feds will have a few quantum computers available for cracking passwords on high-profile cases but not enough for 99% of cases.

Within 10-20 years after that any conventional (e.g. what most PCs today are capable of) encryption other than one-time-pads or the like will be breakable.

One time pads are by definition unbreakable and plausibly deniable if used correctly.

Re:Not impossible, not even hard

[Lehk228]

quantum computers are limited to their native bit width (you can't use a 4 bit QC to do work in 8 bit space in just twice the time.

Re:Not impossible, not even hard

[0123456]

Within 10-20 years after that any conventional (e.g. what most PCs today are capable of) encryption other than one-time-pads or the like will be breakable.

Uh, no. Quantum computers can brute-force conventional encryption in about the square root of the time taken by a conventional computer. Doubling the key size is much easier than building a quantum computer of a usable capability.

This is precisely why AES has a 256-bit key option when conventional computers could never break a 128-bit key anyway. AES256 is about as difficult to brute-force with a quantum computer as AES128 is with a conventional computer.

Re:Not impossible, not even hard

[gweihir]

Nonsense. Quantum computers cannot do that. They can (if they ever work) give you a square-root on the effort. I.e. bring AES-256 down to AES-128. The second one is still infeasible to break for the foreseeable future and more so for a quantum computer as it always will be slow.

Please inform yourself before claiming such utter nonsense.

Don't want vs Can't

[Anonymous Coward]

(unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do);

In the UK he does. And people have been punished for not handing it over.

I wonder, how can they establish if one individual doesn't want to give them the password or simply cannot because he does not remember it, or maybe he relied on a key stored in a file which was deleted already. Can the UK gov. punish someone in this situation ?

More so, there are documented cases of people that forget things temporarily or forever due to a trauma. Being arrested may actually be a very traumatizing experience.

and how the cpu / chipset is setup / ram channels

[Joe_Dragon]

I think they will need all ram chips and then will need to them in the right order as well.

have fun...

[Anonymous Coward]

...going blind sifting through the stacks of recorded media with large uncompressed video files (at least that's what they look like after the stego gets finished), and even if you could know which ones really have data in them, my custom Schneir-class modified-TwoFish 16384-bit crypto guarantees you'll NEVAR get my digital booty!

Re:Well, there is something to be said for key esc

[0123456]

Key escrow protects the company in case the employee gets hit by a car.

If your company is reliant on files on a random employee's computer rather than hosted on a fault-tolerant server that's regularly backed up, you're probably fscked anyway.

Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Biometrics only prevents login, and lets your precious files unencrypted to be extracted fairly simply. (Do not even think of using biometrics to generate a useful-enough password.)

Re:Nope.

[einhverfr]

Couldn't you generate a key somehow off the biometrics info?

Of course this has some really nasty sides. Suppose your friend is killed in a tragic accident?

The Fifth works here?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I wonder if the defendant can legally refuse to give the password. On one hand, there is a law against self-incrimination. But on the other hand during discovery the plaintiff subpoenas documents, even if they are inside a safe to be revealed. Are there any precedences for this in US courts?

Re:The Fifth works here?

[the eric conspiracy]

The deal with a safe is that you can be compelled to turn over a key, but NOT a combination.

There is no law in the US regarding passwords. There is a case involving Ramona Fricosu working it's way up through the federal courts that may decide this.

Re:The Fifth works here?

[PPH]

It depends on what they're after. If they want incriminating evidence, you could probably plead the Fifth. IANAL, so take all of this with a grain of salt. If they are conducting the investigation as a front for espionage*, they'll just grant you immunity. Self incrimination no longer applies. The judge will order the password turned over. Refuse and its contempt of court.

*They don't want you. They just want the data on your laptop.

Re:The Fifth works here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently, in the US, if you are accused of a crime you cannot *generally* be compelled by police or anyone else to hand over passwords to your own computers, as that would be a violation of the Fifth Amendment (you don't have to testify or provide evidence against yourself). But that concept has never been tested in court.

There are cases moving through the court system right now which could set precedent one way or there other. The authoritarian establishment REALLY wants a court decision saying it's ok for them to violate the constitution because you might be a terrist, but nothing has been decided yet!

Court Case Tests Right To Withhold Passwords
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/encryption/231001831

Re:The Fifth works here?

[Fnord666]

I wonder if the defendant can legally refuse to give the password. On one hand, there is a law against self-incrimination. But on the other hand during discovery the plaintiff subpoenas documents, even if they are inside a safe to be revealed. Are there any precedences for this in US courts?

That's where my understanding gets a bit hazy as well. I don't really see where the Fifth amendment should be applicable any more than saying that the police can't open your office safe because it might contain incriminating documents. Shouldn't this all be covered by the fourth amendment?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In the US at least law enforcement should be required to obtain a warrant before searching your computer. This warrant should specifically state what is to be searched for and where they are allowed to search.

One of the benefits of whole disk encryption is that even if law enforcement can force you to give them the password (not saying they can, but let's suppose for argument's sake), at least you control when they access the data and under what circumstances. No warrant, no password. Without the encryption, they have pretty much free reign over things such as what they find (and what they add if it's that type of county) and can fill out the paperwork later.

Re:The Fifth works here?

[swalve]

The fifth doesn't just protect against self-incrimination. It protects more broadly, stating, "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." So even if you are dead innocent, you have the right to not be a witness against yourself.

Re:The Fifth works here?

[PPH]

Like I said, IANAL. But if one has been granted immunity from prosecution related to any offenses uncovered by the search or testimony, the whole issue of being a witness against yourself is a non issue. Can they compel you to be a witness against another person?

Re:The Fifth works here?

[swalve]

I wasn't arguing, just clarifying that the right exists regardless of whether you are guilty or not. I'm not a lawyer either. Yes, if you are given immunity, I believe that you can be compelled to testify. An example of that is if you are the driver for a hitman. The prosecution wants to get the hitman, but the only way to get the evidence is for you to testify to what you saw. But you don't want to do that, because doing that forces you to admit to being part of a felony and you probably would want to invoke your 5th amendment right. So, you are given immunity- your testimony cannot be used against you, so you aren't being compelled to be a witness against yourself.

And yes, you can be compelled to be a witness against someone else. You can be charged with contempt of court, or some kind of obstruction of justice, or perjury, depending on how you play it. One case is where a journalist has some kind of evidence, but won't share it due to their journalistic ethics. Plenty of journalists have been thrown in jail because of that. Another case is like the above, where they trade with you. If you cooperate, you get immunity or a reduced sentence, or maybe even witness protection.

I guess it IS semantics, since it is mostly impossible to MAKE a person say something they are unwilling to, but to COMPEL someone is to put some kind of sanctions on them that forces them to decide that testifying is the easier route. This is an area that is tricky, IMHO. The police are allowed to lie, which to me seems like a sort of compelling. Or in the case of driving under the influence, you theoretically have the right to not testify against yourself by submitting to sobriety tests, but you are compelled to do so because if you don't, there is (often) another law that says you will face some sanction if you invoke that right. Seems wrong to me, but the courts appear to disagree.

Re:The Fifth works here?

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up in the 80s, and if there's one thing I learned from that time period it's that, "I do not recall" (i.e. I forgot!) gets you off scott free and gets you a book deal.

Don't say no, say I cannot recall. Seriously, forgetting anything is easy when you are under extreme stress, as many experts would be ever so happy to testify.

CERT, not US-CERT

[Seventh Magpie]

If it means anything to anyone, Matthew Geiger is from CERT (cert.org) not US-CERT. There is actually a big difference - more credibility.

I always thought you could do one better

[DavidTC]

Encrypted drives do not, obviously, use the password to decode the files. They use the password to decode a key and use that to encode the files.

So I always thought it would be interested to have a computer that, on startup, wipes that part of the disk with 0s, sticking a copy somewhere else on the drive. (Which is not a security risk, because the other parts of the drives are, obviously, encrypted with that key, and you can't open box with a box cutter inside it.)

And during safe shutdown, it puts it back. Or have a program you have to run to put it back, then shutdown.

For safety purposes, you give a copy of the key to someone else for safekeeping. Bonus points if they're out of the country.

Then you leave your computer on, and the screen locked, at all times. Bonus points if you rig it to an alarm where if someone breaks in, it cuts the power. (Also have it do the same if someone inserts firewire or USB while the screen is locked.)

Now it doesn't matter how much you're ordered to comply with the police. They come in, cut the power to your computer, make a disk image...and you'll tell them the damn password all they want, but you are rather at a loss as to how they think that will work, considering the part of the drive with the key stored is has apparently been filled with 0s. (You'll need a lawyer able to explain that what they are asking cannot work.)

Now, like I said, you can lie and pretend you don't know what's going on...or you can wait until they get a court order to have you decrypt, and then tell them what's going on. By which point your friend has hopefully already destroyed the key.

And the joke is, even if you explain everything that happened, this is entirely legal. You have not destroyed any evidence, because the key was already missing from the unencrypted part of the drive when the warrant showed up. (Unlike some of the automated 'destroy data' traps that people try to come up with.) And you have cooperated fully, you literally cannot get to the data. And your friend didn't destroy evidence, because the search warrant was for your stuff, he can delete of his own files he wants until he is told otherwise.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem is that all computers eventually crash for some reason due to buggy video drivers or something. Even in Linux, you need to Sysreq+REISUB sometimes. So your system wouldn't be all that usable.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[blueg3]

If your computer crashes, then your disk is ruined. You'd need to supply the backup key. If the backup key is even vaguely easy to access, then that's how they'll crack your disk regardless, because obtaining the copy of the backup key is almost certainly easier than cracking your password.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[David Jao]

Now it doesn't matter how much you're ordered to comply with the police. They come in, cut the power to your computer...

When law enforcement officers confiscate a computer, they usually (in the US at least) try to transport the computer without powering it down. Standard procedure is to plug a portable generator into the wall outlet powering the computer, unscrew the outlet, and take the whole apparatus (including wall outlet, generator, and computer) to the forensics lab, without interrupting power to the computer. If all the jacks in an outlet are in use, they will unscrew the wall outlet and splice the generator's power cables into the outlet.

The article and summary do mention situations where computers are powered down for transportation. These are exceptions. They are not the norm.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[CodeBuster]

They use the password to decode a key

Not quite. The stored part of the key is combined with the password used as the salt for a cryptographic one-way hash algorithm which generates the secret key used for encryption and decryption when needed. In a proper implementation, the secret key is never actually stored on disk in any permanent form. However, even this system isn't perfect because the secret key can remain in volatile memory for up to 30 seconds or so after power is removed. Additionally, this time can supposedly be prolonged by immediately placing the entire machine in a cold storage box, perhaps with liquid nitrogen coolant, to preserve the state of the volatile memory long enough for it to be copied. However, the most effective method of key recovery is prior surveillance and bugging. For example, the FBI is known to have recovered the PGP keys of mafia associates by clandestinely bugging their keyboards prior to making arrests.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual key is random, user key merely unlocks the actual key that is used (likely how all systems work as parent notes.) This is essentially a locked keyfile which is too important to take such risks. Probably better to have another device store it so then that device is required in addition to the password. One then focuses on the key device and how to improve that.

Many things could be done with the keyfile device. I personally like the idea of a USB flash drive with a few buttons and an LCD to input the password and a wipe password-- you give the wipe password and it corrupts itself on purpose - actual chip failure or something like that. Although some social engineering thing like nailing the drive to the desk where improper removal causes an acid to eat up the chip seems like a good idea. One could embed it into the keyboard as if it was a keylogger or into a printer or something-- making it difficult to find the lost USB drive later on.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[dfenstrate]

I was going to post that, but then you beat me to the punch.

The final 'trick' to such a computer would be some sort of acceleration sensor that would wipe the drive if the computer was moved, or some mechanical device that fries it to the same effect- for example, unloading the feet of the case closes a circuit, powering up a neon sign transformer that lights up a pile of iron and aluminum dust- aka thermite- on top of the hard drive.

The acceleration sensor is a safer bet, because the cops will probably be offended if the computer they're carrying starts spewing molten metal.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Junta]

In addition to the obvious 'your system will likely corrupt itself in day-to-day usage', I'm fairly sure when anyone comes up with a scheme *like* this and says "this is entirely legal", that they probably are wrong. In a scenario in which you are compelled to give up your password (e.g. a country where that is the law), I imagine they could slap you with something to the effect 'conspiracy to tamper with evidence'.

Some people treat the law as a pure logic problem, whereas my impression is a fair amount of 'common sense' is employed. The technical 'truth' that the key was not on disk probably counts for little in a court of law, anyone with half a brain cell can see clearly your intent to tamper with evidence in the event of a warrant.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

In most cases the police will already have some evidence against you. They go in front of a jury and explain what they have and that you went to such great lengths to hide it and you have no way to prove otherwise. Who is a jury going to believe?

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Suddenly, your computer locks up and requires a hard reboot.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Rich0]

Replies made most of the good points here, but you're onto the correct solution. You need to use an encryption system such that the drive ends up in a state where you are unable to recover it yourself, at least not using any means that the attacker can discover. Of course, that could well mean that you're out the data yourself, and you'll certainly be out your computer hardware until it is so old as to be worthless.

Usually this is best implemented using hardware methods (TPM/etc) - assuming that you can trust the hardware. Hardware designed for key storage usually is tamper-resistant and is designed to permanently wipe its contents upon too many failures/etc.

As others have suggested, you need to avoid attacks on RAM as well.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with that is that someone using this is legally correct.

But courts don't try laws. It is whomever has the better lawyers to try to sway a jury of 12 people who likely are Joe Sixpack level of computer knowledge, where the prosecutor said "look, he rigged a mechanism to destroy data", the defense gives the details, jury falls asleep, and then rubber-stamps a guilty verdict.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Nkwe]

Now it doesn't matter how much you're ordered to comply with the police. They come in, cut the power to your computer...

When law enforcement officers confiscate a computer, they usually (in the US at least) try to transport the computer without powering it down. Standard procedure is to plug a portable generator into the wall outlet powering the computer, unscrew the outlet, and take the whole apparatus (including wall outlet, generator, and computer) to the forensics lab, without interrupting power to the computer. If all the jacks in an outlet are in use, they will unscrew the wall outlet and splice the generator's power cables into the outlet.

This is why the parent poster mentioned keeping the screen locked.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Suddenly, your computer locks up and requires a hard reboot.

Then use Mandos (Debian only):

http://www.recompile.se/mandos

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

possibly that's true for high profile cases.

In normal cases anywhere in the world a local copper shows up and just does a fucked up confiscation of the computers on display, cutting the power. Even if the computer in question is running a password cracker and that's displayed on the screen.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[cpghost]

The technical 'truth' that the key was not on disk probably counts for little in a court of law, anyone with half a brain cell can see clearly your intent to tamper with evidence in the event of a warrant.

Right. Laws are often based on intent, not on technical facts. However, if you can prove good intent, this can save your ass here, e.g. if your line of defense runs like this: "Who said I wanted to tamper with the law? I wanted to prevent the competing corporation (or a foreign government) from stealing my trade secrets."

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Junta]

I think that would be a hard sell. You employ a system that has a very real risk of rendering your data useless to yourself with the only added benefit of password being of no use in the event of an unclean shutdown. Given that a strong password is only a 'weakness' if you are in a scenario where you are compelled to surrender it, the mechanism doesn't add significant security in the event of industrial espionage or a foreign government taking just your equipment without access or ability to force you to reveal the password. If they *did* have you and didn't care about your rights, you'd probably either suffer greatly as they won't believe you and continue whatever they are doing or surrender the data (e.g. whatever you have in your head, ignoring storage on the computer). Aside from a legal seizure of equipment in pursuit of a criminal case, I don't see the 'benefit' of such a system.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Sloppy]

That is ultimately a doomed approach to the problem. The running computer is the owner's agent; it's on his side. I'm not really all that worried about the government (or any other attacker) right now, but if I were, I would sincerely hope my adversaries would keep my ally powered up and serving my interests instead of theirs.

Powering off and treating the media as "dead" data in a computer system that is on their side, is the only reasonable long-term strategy for them to adopt.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[DavidTC]

In a scenario in which you are compelled to give up your password (e.g. a country where that is the law), I imagine they could slap you with something to the effect 'conspiracy to tamper with evidence'.

First, a person cannot commit 'conspiracy' solely by their own actions. Conspiracies require, by definition, two people.

Second, failing to create evidence in the form they want isn't tampering with evidence. They can't arrest you for failing to possess evidence. If they could do that, they'd just charge you with a crime if they did a search and didn't find anything.

Perhaps more to the point, it is not illegal to commit legal actions that cover up a crime of yours. People always assume that must somehow be illegal. It is perfectly legal to, for example, after a murder, to wash the blood off your clothing. It only becomes illegal after a search warrant has been issued or they get into evidence some other way. (It is, however, illegal to wash blood off someone else's clothes if you know they murdered someone. That is accessory to murder.)

I'm always a little astonished when people apparently watch too much TV and think the police can threaten you because a legal action you did before any investigation is somehow 'tampering with evidence' or 'impeding an investigation'.

This is something law enforcement officers threaten on TV, and possibly in real life, all the time, but is entirely without any grounds at all.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[DavidTC]

That's one of the reasons why I said to cut the power if any USB device is plugged in while the screen is locked. (The obviously assumes you're using a USB keyboard.)

The other reason is, obviously, that firewire can be used to make disk copies, and that buggy USB drivers can be used to introduce a rootkit.

It is probably theoretically possible to splice a data grabber into a USB cable while it's plugged in, but that seems unlike to happen.

Likewise, I've never understood the whole 'They can shut down your computer and make copy of memory' worry. Yes, that's a fun theoretical worry, but in actual reality, if you have the computer rigged to shut down on disconnect of USB devices, they're almost certainly going to trigger that simply getting the computer out where they can do that. And it's easy enough to make that required. Hell, I have a computer where that would happen by accident. (I have USB cables run to the next room, through the floor, along with s-video, so I can watch TV in bed.)

And, of course, there are accelerometers and case locks and stuff like that, instead of rigging something. Or, and here's a fun idea: A 3G receiver that simply keeps track of the nearest towers.

Yes, it's all good and clever they've invented a way to splice into the power so they don't have to shut the computer off when running it, which stops the utterly accidental problem of cutting the computer off. However, it's rather trivial to make it where you can't move a computer without the computer itself knowing, and cutting itself off.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

hen law enforcement officers confiscate a computer, they usually (in the US at least) try to transport the computer without powering it down.

I was not aware of this. A little google search turned up a technique called hotplug confiscation. ere is a YouTube video to boot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G8sEYCOv-o
 

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[dynamo]

If true, this is ridiculously expensive, considering how common actual FDE is, and how huge of a loophole it is for a computer of unknown capability to be left powered and running for hours after it's been moved. All it takes is a $4 movement sensor and it can write a minimal OS to lonely corner of the disk, and then boot to it and have it's entire operation be to overwrite every disk sector with random data gathered from the physical movement of the machine, 1s, and 0s. Over and over, until they get to the lab.

Once this kind of thing is commonplace, leaving the computer powered up during transport will stop being commonplace - if it really is.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Add a gps card to the tower? Check for wireless networks in range, if not found power off?

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[badkarmadayaccount]

Hidden accelerometer. Or gyro. Or GPS. Whatever. The second they move it they're fucked. Oh, and mouse-jiglers can be countered with white-listing.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Have any links to back this up?

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it doesn't matter how much you're ordered to comply with the police. They come in, cut the power to your computer...

When law enforcement officers confiscate a computer, they usually (in the US at least) try to transport the computer without powering it down. Standard procedure is to plug a portable generator into the wall outlet powering the computer, unscrew the outlet, and take the whole apparatus (including wall outlet, generator, and computer) to the forensics lab, without interrupting power to the computer. If all the jacks in an outlet are in use, they will unscrew the wall outlet and splice the generator's power cables into the outlet.

Add a gyroscope and a GPS dongle?

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Toafan]

Backup key is only half the story this way...
So, I can't tell if this point applies. I'm hunching it doesn't, hence this post.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[Toafan]

Pressure sensor in the feet cuts power inside the case/power supply?

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[xenobyte]

The final 'trick' to such a computer would be some sort of acceleration sensor that would wipe the drive if the computer was moved, or some mechanical device that fries it to the same effect- for example, unloading the feet of the case closes a circuit, powering up a neon sign transformer that lights up a pile of iron and aluminum dust- aka thermite- on top of the hard drive.

The acceleration sensor is a safer bet, because the cops will probably be offended if the computer they're carrying starts spewing molten metal.

Perhaps, but just label it with a warning! - Make it clear that any tampering may result in the physical destruction of the hardware. They can't move the thing, they can't switch power (a phase shift might trigger the destruction), they can't touch the keyboard or open the case. They can't access the raw data (clone the drive etc.) and letting you 'defuse' the system... Good luck with that. There's no copies and they can be sure that 'an accident' might happen if they make you disable the device, destroying any and all evidence.

Re:I always thought you could do one better

[dfenstrate]

That'll be the easiest way until the first few guys are able to deny investigators access to their computer. After that law enforcement folks will start drilling locks and accessing case insides to bypass the switches.
I suppose with a combination of gps & acelleration sensors, you could eventually up the game until they have to ex-EOD guys with advanced computer skills to secure access to a running computer.

There's probably money to be made building a hard-drive slot internal device that will do all this for you.

You'd need a device that could maybe short the power supply to cause the fuse to blow under certain movement conditions, and then a running process that would shutdown the computer if this device was disconnected.

Hasn't been decided yet

[Sycraft-fu]

There is some conflicting case law on the matter so who knows? However what would work is "I can't recall my password." There's no way to prove that is false and working in IT I can tell you that people forget their passwords all the time (ALL the fucking time :P). So a person says "I can't recall my password," and there's not a lot that can be done.

Re:Hasn't been decided yet

[CodeBuster]

So a person says "I can't recall my password," and there's not a lot that can be done.

I've always liked this exchange from the 1998 film Ronin :

Sam: Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That's the first thing they teach you.

Vincent: Who taught you?

Sam: I don't remember. That's the second thing they teach you.

Ultimate in planted evidence...

[barfy]

You want to do someone in, and have access to their computer, a USB program that creates an encrypted partition would be enough to do one in. Proving one's innocence would probably be near impossible.

Re:Ultimate in planted evidence...

[Anonymous Coward]

dd if=/dev/urandom of=private.tc bs=1M count=2048

Re:Ultimate in planted evidence...

[gl4ss]

that's why justice system is supposed to work the other way.

Re:Ultimate in planted evidence...

[Xarius]

I may be naive in saying this, but people shouldn't be proving their own innocence...law enforcement should be trying to prove their guilt

Re:Ultimate in planted evidence...

[Mia'cova]

One benefit of full disk encryption with a TPM chip is security against that kind of thing. If the disk is modified, you'll know. You wouldn't be able to plant evidence without detection. Mind you, when evidence is planted, you aren't trying to convince the victim. Rather, you're trying to convince a 3rd party such as a jury. Just because the victim knows the disk was messed with, it doesn't mean the prosecution will have trouble getting a conviction based on a planted external hard disk..

So really, the benefit comes as a defense against root kits being planted via physical access to the disk. More handy for the CNN reporter's laptop being messed with while in China. Or, in a consumer case, it'll be more of your win8 trusted boot which is used as a defense against your standard rootkit. Despite a software exploit, the hardware protection won't allow modification to system files go unnoticed.

Re:Ultimate in planted evidence...

[Anonymous Coward]

Proving your innocence? Here I was thinking it was guilt that had to be established beyond reasonable doubt.

Minor issues

[currently_awake]

what about: power failure, UPS failure, hardware failure. Losing all your data sucks. This method would block keyloggers though, if they didn't know. Except modern drive recovery can restore the blanked out sector.

Re:Minor issues

[jmottram08]

Except that it cant restore blanked sectors, or at least it hasn't been proven, only theorized. Even the theoretical only could work at an expense that your local or state attorney general wont pay.

If you are a terrorist and the DOD is after you, id start to worry. Anything less than that? no.

Re:Minor issues

[Anonymous Coward]

>Except modern drive recovery can restore the blanked out sector.

No longer true. Apparently since the HD industry moved to perpendicular recoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording) there is now no longer enough space between tracks on the HD to recover the "previous version" of the track once overwritten.

Re:Minor issues

[gknoy]

If you're paranoid enough to have this scheme in place (which seems very clever), you're probably patient enough to wait for your friend to send you the list of bits via fedex so that you can image edit it back onto the drive. If I had this in place, I think I could wait a day or three to access my lolcats and WoW.

Re:Minor issues

[DavidTC]

Except modern drive recovery can restore the blanked out sector.

Uh, no.

It has never, despite it being 'common wisdom', been possible to recover overwritten sectors on a hard drive.

No one has ever demonstrated it in the entire history of hard drives.

It was a theoretical attack a long time ago, on pre-IDE 'MFM' hard drives.But we moved off that sort of drive in 1986.

And even then, it didn't work. It was a theory that said with a very poorly build hard drive, it might be possible to recover some data. Like I said, no one's ever actually shown this.

And with IDE, we moved to RLL encoding which means, statistically, you couldn't get anything. With an MFM encoded drives, if you got 50% of the data with 50% accuracy, you had 25% of the data and might possibly come up with something, although, like I said, no one ever has managed this.

But with RLL encoded drives, if you got 50% of the data with 50% accuracy, you have nothing. It is not really possible to get a partial byte.

No that anyone has ever demonstrated reading anything from a ' The idea that you need to do anything more than overwrite a sector to make it unreadable is one of those zombie lies that simply cannot die.

The only way to recover a lost sector is if it was going bad at some point, so the hard drive made a copy of it and remapped that sector to the copy. Which means the original might still be there. (OTOH, the original was going bad, so who knows if it's still readable.) The odds of this happening are astronomical.

Decrypt password

[Grelfod]

Hows about just using a decrypt like "G0Fukyourself"
Then even if tortured to the breaking point when you tell them the password they may just kill you and get it over with. Either way you can tell them and they will think you are just a shit - even though it is the real password - - - - - just tell them - - - - - go fuck yourself!

The Original Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the original article...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/73235083/The-growing-impact-of-full-disk-encryption-on-digital-forensics

Re:The Original Article

[jbolden]

Thanks AC!

Well, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good.

More research?

[cheekyjohnson]

"Research is needed to develop new techniques and technology for breaking or bypassing full disk encryption."

And, if they somehow manage that, research will be needed to develop new techniques and technology for creating even stronger encryption.

Re:More research?

[Anonymous Coward]

FDE actually is more of a benefit for police and LEOs than it causes them problems.

Lets view two realistic worse-case scenarios (with FDE being breakable versus not), removing the ticking time-bomb scenario from the equation for now:

1: A prosecutor has to let a hardened child molestor go free, because of how good FDE is.

2: A list of police informant contacts on a stolen machine gets stolen, the fence who finds the laptop is able to decrypt it. Next thing the local police know, all their good contacts now have extra sunlights in their craniums forcibly installed, as well as a good chunk of their family members.

If given a balance, LEOs, companies, and government benefit far more from FDE than they would lose. They have *far* more to lose in secrets than to gain in prosecuting the one diaper sniper they get with a backdoor.

Oh... putting in backdoors in FDE algorithms is expert footshooting -- just like Clipper/Skipjack, the bad guys WILL find them, and will use those to wreak large amounts of havoc.

Of course, when the bad guys know that FDE is backdoored, there is one other method they can go to -- storing data remotely and just using their machine as a client, say with a Citrix terminal server. Come a bust, the laptop is clean, the virtual desktop is clean, and there is no evidence of where anything is.

In fact, I worked at a company this paranoid ages ago. All their PCs booted from CD-ROMs, and they remoted into a terminal server via their VPN in another country for all their work.

So, the bad guys can easily just move their data to countries hostile to the US, add some type of system with a duress capability so if they type in a slighly different password, the remote site deletes data, or just blocks access, and there is nothing that can be done.

Re:More research?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the government will fund both of these efforts...

Re:Well, there is something to be said for key esc

[Aqualung812]

There is a difference between:
-company fscked because data was lost on a single laptop hard drive
and
-pain in the ass that the latest work the employee did on the plane is now inaccessible because they can't produce their password

Key escrow is great in those situations, and I've had to use it before.

that doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

The hidden volume is stored in what appears to be free space of the outer volume. Without you revealing the key to the hidden volume, there's no way to know whether the free space is actually free or not (it will appear to be filled with random gibberish, the same as the entire volume is when you first create it). Unless you can account for all of the space of the volume as part of *readable* files, you can't prove there's no hidden volume squirreled away in the "empty" part, and this problem applies recursively.

Re:that doesn't work

[rant64]

you can't prove there's no hidden volume squirreled away in the "empty" part

That is true as long as an adversary does not have access to the disk contents already. If you were able to look at the encrypted volume and its free space over the course of time, you would see changes in "free space" every time the hidden volume is used.

You ever got home and your computer was suddenly turned off?

and what if it's not all allocated?

[Chirs]

I have a disk with unpartitioned free space on it. It could very easily hold encrypted data and there's no way for me to prove that it doesn't.

Re: Here is a solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have every one use ARM processors then they will not have the processing performance capable of doing full disk encryption in a reasonable amount of time.

nice sig Re:I always thought you could do one bett

[Fubari]

If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?

DavidTC - nice sig. Along those lines, I thought this was good read: http://www.amazon.com/Unincorporated-Man-Sci-Essential-Books/dp/0765318997

Use keyfile on removable USB stick as key

[KWTm]

This would not work for those middle-of-the-night surprise raids, but would work if you could get a 5- or even 1-minute warning; definitely works for airport crossings, etc.

Put a keyfile on a removable USB stick. It *looks like* that stick is acting as a physical key. Instead of typing a password, you direct TrueCrypt (or whichever other encryption program) to use that file. When law enforcement arrives, you get rid of the USB key and the drive is undecryptable.

The trick is that the keyfile is something easy for you to memorize, like some lines from Shakespeare or something. (If you like, insert your mother's maiden name before the 17th word to salt the text.) Law enforcement has no way to know that this is not a bunch of random characters, if they don't have the USB key.

Re:Use keyfile on removable USB stick as key

[betterunixthanunix]

When law enforcement arrives, you get rid of the USB key and the drive is undecryptable.

This gets you charged with obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, etc. The penalties for these crimes may be less severe than the crimes you are trying to cover up, in which case it is acceptable, but the point of deniable encryption is that you can assert your innocence by producing the innocent key.

Full Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Mediafire: http://bit.ly/uCMxbf

Biometrics is for identification, not for auth...

[gr8dude]

This won't work. Each time a scanner reads the biometric data of a person (fingerprint, iris, etc) - you always get different data. This is caused by varying factors such as lighting, temperature, angle at which the eye or finger faces the scanner, and so on.

If you use the raw biometric data as an AES key - you will simply not be able to generate the same key again.

The data obtained from a biometric scanner are processed and compared with a known template (obtained when the person was enrolled into the system), the result is a number - the probability that the templates are identical. This is good enough for some purposes, but this is not suitable for data encryption: in the case of AES-256, you need 256 bits for the key and 256 bits for the IV (initialization vector). Flip a bit and kiss your data goodbye!

Biometrics can be an additional security factor - scan the iris, if there's a 95% match, go to the next phase. Typically, the next phase is to enter a password, which is used to decrypt the actual* encryption key. One can reverse engineer the system and make it bypass biometrics (jump directly to "next phase") - but no one can obtain the decryption key. No one, because that requires information not contained within the system itself.

If you rely exclusively on biometrics, it means that as soon as you perform the scan, if the templates match - you read the actual key from a database or some other location. In this case, the police can simply get access to the database and extract the key.

The thing to remember - biometrics: good for identification, not good for authentication.

* this key is randomly generated, to ensure it will be secure. A reasonable system will not encrypt the data directly with a person's password, because such passwords don't contain enough entropy. So, there is a distinction between "password" and "encryption key".

Non-paywalled copy

[Zanadou]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/73235083/The-growing-impact-of-full-disk-encryption-on-digital-forensics

Re:Biometrics is for identification, not for auth.

[PopeRatzo]

The thing to remember - biometrics: good for identification, not good for authentication.

Good explanation thanks.

I have apparently seen too many movies where the super-spy has to bring the dead body up to the palm-reading plate so he can open the door and diffuse the nuke.

"ameliorate"?

[Anonymous Coward]

To ameliorate is to improve or make better. (verb)

An example of something that ameliorates is ibuprofen when used to help a headache.

Why not let them rot instead?

[shirque]

unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do

Coercive detention, anyone? Maybe not an option in the US, fifth amendment and all, although -- because of the very nature of common law -- that's a matter of interpretation, but certainly in most civil law systems (e.g. continental Europe).

Re:Why not let them rot instead?

[cpghost]

For human rights reasons, in most of continental Europe, coercive detention can't exceed a relative small number of months, at the most. The inconvenience is usually less than the time you have to serve if convicted. Plus, coercive detention alone is not considered as conviction, which is pretty much important if you apply for a job later on. So most people would still opt for coercive detention instead of cooperating with the authorities (if that cooperation would cause them more harm than good).

Re:Why not let them rot instead?

[EmagGeek]

They don't need a coercive detention. They can just charge the person with something related to terrorism and hold them indefinitely.

Geeks moving entropy around...

[ResidentSourcerer]

Wouldn't geeks moving entropy around online also be a PITA to the RIAA enforcers? If lots of people exchange song or movie sized chunks of /dev/random, then you have plausible deniability.

Many companies mandate full disk encryption

[davecb]

Especially ones using Windows, so every one of their employees is at risk of being required to give up the truecrypt password for the hidden partition that they didn't create. Not a desirable state of affairs, either for the police or for the employee...
--dave

My ideal encryption

[Mia'cova]

Using my home desktop as an example, the typical law enforcement scenario would be the police executing a warrant and confiscating all the hardware in my house. First, if I'm not at my machine, the most sensitive data should not be available. RAM can be removed from a machine and read. I think there's a minute or two before the data is impossible to read. So any encryption keys loaded in RAM are vulnerable. I've seen reference to some neat systems which store keys in unused debug registers in the CPU. Kinda neat, but having the data dismounted when you lock/leave your machine is a pretty close 2nd.

Rather than a simple password-based scheme, I would have a remote server anonymously store the key. Your machine would create a secure connection to the key store server. You would request they value (encryption key) corresponding to some key. If the key is not requested for some period of time, it is destroyed. I have no idea how much time would exist between being arrested and being compelled to reveal a key. But given that you should have time to consult with a lawyer at the very least, you should be able to determine some period of time where the key is destroyed prior to you being required to supply the password. So, through no lack of cooperation on your part, the data is destroyed. And that's especially true if you are in prison with no ability to extend the timeout. I can't imagine why this scheme would be illegal to configure. As such, I also can't imagine how it would be obstruction of justice for the key to automatically self-destruct.

There are a ton of ways to improve on the particulars of that scheme to make it more secure and less prone to failure. I just wanted to be brief so I kept it simple. Ever since taking a coding theory course in school, I've loved the academics of encryption. And as a bit of a psychology/sociology/justice/politics nerd, I find these sorts of clashes between encryption and the real world incredibly fascinating.

But as far as justice goes, my views are to make things which should be illegal as difficult/impossible as you can in the first place. It always blows my mind how easily stolen hardware can be resold and used, break-ins can go unsolved, people can have no medical coverage, chronic speeders/drinkers not lose their license, unlicensed drivers use a car, etc. What so many call a "police state," I wish we had. I'm sick of how easy it is to abuse the system. And that goes for those abusing it from the top just as much as those examples at the bottom. Stealing an election or a billion dollars should be impossible too :)

How about this...

[Jigsy]

I view the concept of sending someone to prison as torture in order to extract a password; and torture is a violation of basic human rights. (I live in the UK by the way.)

I use TrueCrypt to store my bank details and other important information (passwords, etc.) (Though I have been meaning to getting around to hiding my collection of hentai artwork seeing as "drawings are people too." *rolls eyes*)

That said, with files you can at least specify key files that must be used in conjunction with a password to view the contents of a standard/hidden file partition.

And while I don't want to give anyone ideas on how they could utilize this for nefarious purposes (terrorism, etc.), what's stopping people storing these files on Micro SD cards?; if the Police raid your place you could at least swallow the damn thing. (Though if you did this frequently it would probably put a strain on your wallet...)

Idea: Claim 2nd hand purchase of an encrp'd drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Claim to have purchased a used drive at a previous point in time and that you yourself was trying to "decrypt" it on your system? This would be based on the premise that they couldn't truly prove that the encrypted drive or system wasn't purchased second hand. In other words, this would be a variation on the idea that the government would have to "prove" unequivocally that you do know the password for a encrypted drive.

I've read quite a few of the comments and I haven't really seen this idea brought up.

Why should they not have access to the data?

[eldacan]

I don't get why the police forensics should not have access to a hard drive data when they have a warrant.

What's next, we should fight against the police right to enter a home with a warrant?

Seriously, people are fine with police carrying guns, but they should not have access to a hard drive because they could misuse the power?

I'd rather fight for sound rules on delivering warrants, and efficient checks on abuse of power.

Law Enforcement

[DarthVain]

Considering the goons they seem to hire to beat down the occupy hippy students, I'm surprised the techs the hire are able to mash out a paragraph on a keyboard, let alone break crypto.

Besides, they are probably too busy playing Madden 12.