DoD Computer Forensics Lab to use Beowulf

Doran writes "The U.S. Dept. of Defense is showing off its new $15,000,000 Computer Forensics Lab and it looks like they'll be using a Beowulf cluster to gleen as much info as possible from the computers they confiscate. Here is the story from Nando. An interesting aside is that they seem to be using Clinton's 'approval' last week to allow sale of more powerful encryption software as a justification to ask for $80,000,000 more for the Center. " Beowulf cluster mentioned, but not Linux, oddly enough.

Comments

No surprise.

[Apuleius]

It's not just cracking codes. If you have to find files containing evidence somewhere amidst all those MP3's, those clock cycles running grep and find begin to add up.

Also, if you're scanning someone's drive for illegal images, it helps to automate a process so a human being doesn't have to mark which are illegal and which are netscape-cached Slashdot icons, for example.

Finally, in case of a nuked drive, it's useful to the feds to be able to dd if=confiscated-drive of=beowulf and then let it chug along.

And all of that beats this situation:

NYT article that says law enforcement agencies routinely seize hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computers and hard drives as evidence, but have so few computer experts that confiscated equipment can gather dust for months or years until someone decides whether or not they contain criminal information.

If you really want to hide stuff from the Feds...

[Paul Crowley]

...you'll need plausible deniability. In other words, you'll need the Steganographic File System just released for Linux. It provides a uniquely powerful form of information hiding: you can type in a passphrase that reveals a certain amount of the disk, and there's no way of telling whether there are other, deeper passphrases that would reveal more. This means that there's no legal duress that can force you to reveal your most secret data.

However, if the attacker is using rubber hose cryptanalysis, it means there's nothing you can do to convince them, once and for all, that the passphrase you've given them is the real, true, final passphrase. Could be painful...
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