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TrueCrypt To Go Through a Crowdfunded, Public Security Audit
An anonymous reader writes "After all the revelations about NSA's spying efforts, and especially after the disclosure of details about its Bullrun program aimed at subverting encryption standards and efforts around the world, the question has been raised of whether any encryption software can be trusted. Security experts have repeatedly said that it you want to trust this type of software, your best bet is to choose software that is open source. But, in order to be entirely sure, a security audit of the code by independent experts sounds like a definitive answer to that issue. And that it exactly what Matthew Green, cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Kenneth White, co-founder of hosted healthcare services provider BAO Systems, have set out to do. The software that will be audited is the famous file and disk encryption software package TrueCrypt. Green and White have started fundraising at FundFill and IndieGoGo, and have so far raised over $50,000 in total." (Mentioned earlier on Slashdot; the now-funded endeavor is also covered at Slash DataCenter.)
Slash DataCenter? Do not want!!
But who will audit the auditors?
So it can be subverted from the inside either by NSA plants or through NSLs compelling Google to do so? No thanks...
So they're getting crowd-funded money to do all their testing to ensure no one can see the NSA's back doors they have in place.
Alright, I'll volunteer. Once the money has cleared my account, consider it "validated."
Are you nuts?
That might be the shittiest idea anyone ever had !
.. would the people of the United States have trust issues with the NSA?
...i'll feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of terabytes suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly erased. I fear something terrible has happened to the hard drives industry.
So it can be subverted from the inside either by NSA plants or through NSLs compelling Google to do so? No thanks...
I thought the NSA plant the auditor ...
The Windows version is compiled with MSVC, which almost certainly has a NSA backdoor that gets compiled into the TrueCrypt binary.
They can audit all they like but if they are American why should a believe a word they say ?, with all those secret courts, secret gagging orders, oh and a $50B budget
Not sure which Google hit you are referring to, but I suspect it is the following.
http://hackfromhell.blogspot.com/2012/12/truecrypt-hid-device-hack-with-knoppix.html
According to the author, due to design choices made by the developers of Truecrypt, it (TrueCrypt) is being used to subvert not only itself but as a means to infiltrate an entire system.
If this is true, then TrueCrypt is a poor choice for this audit (much less, anything else).
I feel like this has been reported on 5 times by now. Yes we know they are raising money, please no more updates until the findings from the audit are in.
In the mean time is there any actual point to this? While TrueCrypt can be one of the best methods for a typical home user or even tech savy business person to encrypt that naughty folder. But it honestly isn't as widely used as they make it out to be. Most softwares or businesses use their own encryption. Not to mention the nature of TrueCrypt means its most often used to secure locals files or drives, meaning unless the NSA has direct control over your computer they really cant get at your stuff.
Also would this resolve anything? As soon as the audit is done people will either, question the findings for one reason or another. When in the end all the audit can say is if there is an intentional backdoor or if there is an obvious flaw in the code that would leave it vulnerable. Even if neither of these turn up there is still a very real chance the NSA found their own unintentional flaw in the code that allows them to greatly reduce the time required to decrypt the drive.
They also apparently:
hacked my Power Supply by implanting a trasp device in My Bose Speakers and possibly my high end water machine that sent malware farts through my electrical grid and tunneled into my system that way.
sounds TOTALLY not paranoid schizophrenic.
On topic, Truecrypt is just a tool. It can't be "subverted" to do evil - it just exists and people can use it for 'good' or 'evil.' My hammer is really good and pounding nails ('good',) but would work equally well in password extraction ('evil') =)
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
The NSA has decades of computer analysis running 24/7 on hardware no one can ever hope to match. Any audit done by "security professionals" will generally be worthless as it does not account for flaws or new approaches that require a specific dollar amount in terms of resources to implement.
I think the best approach is to stop using standard algorithms altogether and start implementing independent weak algorithms. That makes the task much more difficult as algorithm identification is a harder task than the break itself.
Let's make them work for it.
That might be the shittiest idea anyone ever had !
What bothers you about that? The ads? The direct NSA backdoors? The fact that they'd abandon it after an extended beta period?
Yeah, I know, that part seemed far-fetched to me as well.
BUT, the other stuff regarding TrueCrypt struck a note with me, in particular the screens of the TrueCrypt rules regarding admin rights and read-only enforcement structure--THAT could be used just as he explains. In that case, it would seem that the encryption--in it's mission to protect encrypted data from simply being over-written, actually allows malware to use this protection scheme to protect the malware. Simply encrypt the malware with TrueCrypt, and TrueCrypt protects it from being over-written AND allows said encrypted data to be loaded before the OS.
Pretty compelling. The guy made some of his data available for others to tear apart (he admits his weaknesses in this area). Perhaps someone here can actually do that.
Yeah, you'd end up needing to sign in with a google account, storing your private keys in the cloud, posting stats on your g+ and allowing google to index the encrypted data.
awesome.. sign me up.
We know that the current version of GCC doesn't have the "Ken Thompson" trojan. The original version could have, theoretically a but it couldn't survive so many versions. Also, gdb would have revealed it long ago. ...
Maybe gcc also trojans gdb? And ptrace, and
You have to imagine that the author wrote specialized trojans for a bunch of programs that hadn't been created yet, and hid them all in a few kilobytes. That's beyond impossible, even for the best programmer in the world.
The best way to deal with strong encryption is to go around it, to use the back door. Those are the flaws an audit would reveal, issues not with the actual encryption, which is a fairly small part of the software, but with the other 90% of the code .
The encryption itself has been analyzed, and will continue to be analyzed, outside of Truecrypt, which is just one of many packages that use the same encryption.
Ps - you're independent weak encryption is not hard to figure out. Let's say you use it for some PHP script on your web site. Well, it's on a publicly accessible web server, and it's friggin PHP, so I'll have the source code in ten minutes. As soon as I see the source, not only do I know what weak algorithms you're using, but I can also see the common flaws in your particular implementation.
A case in point -
A common "do it my own way" idea is to stack hash algorithms. Take a sha256 of the data, an MD5 of that, and RC4 that or whatever. Well, stacking hashes results in a hash that's provably WEAKER than the weakest hash in the chain. Each step you take to make it stronger actually makes it weaker.
I'm a total DIYer. I'd even DIY stitching a cut. There are two things you shouldn't DIY - high explosives and information security. (But low explosives are fun.)
it's a rambling.
but anyhow, as I gathered, in the story the hackers were the one's hiding their shit with truecrypt and not the guy who was getting hacked by triads...
frankly it's written like a madman.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The site has to be a hoax.
My fav so far:
I bet his herpes also got 10 times worse as well :-p
LOL:
It gets better: How they hacked my iPhone last year in Asia
So, um, yea. I would only read that blog if looking for a good laugh. A big "Thank you"goes out to the gp for the lulz.
I think it is an interesting idea of have a third party audit the code. However, I see the following problem with it:
The advantages of also having a Bug Bounty is:
Sadly, though, there is only one party offering to take a huge sum of money to crawl through code for a few weeks or possibly months. And it seems to me that the parties offering to do the work have a vested interest in the results coming out "negative for NSA bugs".
This means ( as others here have pointed out ) that there cannot truly be independent verification. As someone else points out, the money would be better spent on bug hunts.
The approach bears the mark of vigilantism. I say that, because encryption operating outside of scientific controls isn't trustworthy encryption. Anything that even touches the subject of encryption and expects to come away tinged with credibility needs to be isolated under scientifically controlled conditions.
Without the financially disinterested, scientifically and academically conglomerate third party offering to perform this same role as a purely academic public service, the scientific control doesn't exist.
You might point out that Green & White are academics, but also read in the article that they are going to take the money and hire an auditing company to do the actual work. That company is at this time completely up in the air. So the academe is thrown right out. The company could decide to hide troubling lines of code from Green & White. and give the code a clean audit. Who is going to raise the other $50,000 to cross-verify using similar means, when that means is so flawed that it obviously cries out for cross verification?
And what are Green & White hoping to get out of this? Are they going to become some sort of security world fixers? Are they going to become the secret holy grail of opportunistic businesspersons, the mythological "information brokers"? They aren't starting out with a purely academic premise or approach, so this is not going to be all that worthwhile for their academe so much as for their standing in that cross-ways between what Eisenhower referred to as "the military industrial complex" and what he referred to as "the educational research complex".
And our hypothetical, white-horse scientific group's work would have to be redundant. No part of the code could be independently verified by one person -- each procedure and call would have to be pored over by a panel to verify unanimously ( with the group ) that the conclusion about the reliability of the code segment was sound and that that section of code is trustworthy. Can we say anything like that is going to happen as this group of a few people munches and dines its way through the $50,000?
And this smacks of advertising. We're in a time, now, just after numerous encryption, secured storage, and secured email services have self-destructed in the wake of serious allegations of domestic spying. Apparently they found that they were either currently compromised, were facing a future of being compromised, or could not handle the pressure that the NSA was putting on them immediate or projected.
That's entirely the reason why this is happening -- to take a product that is popular and to scrutinize it carefully, taking advantage of its open source to contrast how different that reality is from the reality of closed box cloud services. It's a brand demonstration for the open source community in the least sense, but in a greater sense it's a product demonstration for TrueCrypt. Even TrueCrypt has rung in its "approval" of the audit.
We have people asking "who's auditing the auditors", "whose watching the watchdogs", etc. But who's watching this, this whole fiasco? A very limited crowd of people for whom it's not really a learning experience so much as reminder of the drudgery and toil that code and coding actually represent.
Let's ask ourselves seriously why this code isn't already vouchsafed by the community, first of all. If you can't take a completely open group that could theoretically consist of anybody with a computer terminal and say that this sample group -- the open source community, basically the world at large -- is sufficient to r
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
We need to turn this into a perminant comittee to rountinely test all open source encryption software, popular kernels (linux, freebsd, etc...), webbrowsers(firefox,chromium), webservers(apache, nginx), and other essential bits of free software we depend on (mariadb, php, python, etc...)
frankly it's written like a madman.
Like or by?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt#Licensing_and_Open_Source_status
#if BACKDOORED
random &= 0xffff
#endif
Buy it from Whom? It's open source!