Hes protesting against surveillance of non-americans: exactly the opposite of what we should be protesting. Everyone spies, and its sort of the NSA's job. Whats not their job is to spy on Americans while bypassing the 4th amendment.
But he didnt lay out a plausible attack. He indicated that an attacker could determine your filesystem based on sector useage, but thats it. Telling how the encrypted data is laid out shouldnt help you; even if you could grab the sectors containing individual files (which should not be possible), you STILL wouldnt be any closer to breaking the encryption-- if you were, the encryption is already flawed.
What hes basically saying is that the encryption is not secret and your OS / FS may be identifiable, even if the actual data is encrypted. Thats not terribly shocking, since you could already generally tell what OS is using a particular WDE if youre using truecrypt or dm-crypt (since one is windows-only, and one is linux only, and both have identifiable bootloaders). Heck, if youre using truecrypt for WDE, the whole world ALREADY knows your filesystem: in-place encryption requires NTFS, and you cant use truecrypt WDE with anything but Windows >= XP && Windows 8. That in no way weakens the encryption.
You and he are both correct to point out to a potential encryptee (is that a word?) that TRIM does have implications for plausible deniability. Im saying that other than in crypto-geek fantasies, plausible deniability seems incredibly un-useful when your adversary is already 100% sure you're using encryption in the first place (a trivial look at the bootloader would tell them that).
If knowing how to construct a stream of contiguous, encrypted data helps you to break it easier than when it was scrambled / fragmented encrypted data, then your encryption is fundamentally broken, and turning TRIM off wont change that fact.
Otherwise there would be an option in truecrypt "please fragment my data as much as possible to make the encryption stronger".
Your links consist of truecrypt devs saying "it could be used for further analysis" without explaining what is meant by that, and some guy's random blog from 2011. Find an article from dm-crypt / truecrypt devs laying out a plausible attack, or something from a respected crypto expert (like Bruce Schneier), otherwise Im not buying it.
Ask anyone who has worked in child care. Ask parents whether boys or girls are more rambunctious. Get enough anecdotal evidence and it starts to become data.
That is not correct: its not about doing anything safely or even about wear-leveling. The filesystem is what handles writes, and it knows where is safe to write to, and wear-leveling is helped by TRIM but that is not what TRIM actually does.
TRIM simply informs the drive that it can perform an erase on a particular block when the filesystem marks it as deleted. This is so that any erases or remapping that needs to happen can e done when the drive is idle-- basically, it triggers garbage collection. With TRIM and auto-garbage collection off, the drive into a brick wall when it needs to write 10GB of data and it turns out that there are no already blanked blocks available; in that case it would have to do read-erase-writes for 10GB or more (due to amplification) worth of blocks, slowing everything to a relative crawl.
Just about everything an SSD does is improved by garbage collection, and TRIM is just OS- / FS- triggered garbage collection.
Im not entirely sure you understand what TRIM does. Its not to get rid of random writes, its to deal with a scenario where you have written and deleted 120GB from a 120GB SSD. Your OS has marked 120GB as "deleted", but those blocks are still occupied and cannot be re-written until they are first erased. This incurs a penalty, particularly since the erase block size is typically larger than the FS cluster size.
You could, I dont know, check the size of the partition on the "plausible" volume he shows you. If drive size is 500GB, and the "plausible" partition is 250, and hes using truecrypt... GEE I WONDER.
If the drive is encrypted, theres no more or less threat from brute-forcing.
From a plausible deniability standpoint, Im not terribly sure how helpful that is ANYWAYS. If someone wants to know if youre using truecrypt, they could, I dont know, look at the MBR and see whether its using the Truecrypt bootloader. The idea that you can say "What partition?" when goons grab your mysteriously unreadable laptop is laughable. Im sure there are super corner cases where that would be helpful, but generally if youre being held by the sorts of people who have the means and ability to do rubber hose cryptography, theyre not going to put up with your BS about "but wait look i gave you a password that boots to an Ubuntu partition which only accounts for 1/2 of the drive's size, and has no data worth encrypting whatsoever!"
Being involved with multiple organizations which employ encryption for very different reasons, none of them use plausible deniability / hidden encryptions; Id reckon because its not terribly helpful, or even plausible.
No. That is not true. *nix email clients generally do not open attachments automatically,
Nor do windows. Cryptolocker is launched when the user opens an encrypted zip-file, then doubleclicks the "attachment.exe" inside. *nix will not protect you from that sort of thing.
While Windows, and its email clients, are more cautious there was a time when even deleting a email caused it to be opened
Thats inaccurate. There was a security bug with really old versions of outlook (pre 2003) where you could cause that behavior, but it was not a design decision. You could (rightly) criticize that bug, but its not like there havent been code execution bugs in Linux, Firefox, OSX, Safari, etc etc etc. Bringing up ~10+ year old bugs in software thats not even part of the OS as proof that Windows 7 / 8 is insecure, is not really convincing.
Having been on a team that dealt with cryptolocker, I can say that you are not correct.
Cryptolocker often is sent as malicious executables contained in zip file email attachments, which could target Linux or OSX or AIX just as easily.
you tend to be screwed no matter how good the AV program is,
If the virus is in usermode, the AV can easily remove it no matter what measures it takes, since the AV runs with root privileges. If the virus has root, it depends on what virus and what AV and how recent each is.
The whole premise of "Windows gets viruses because its insecure" is such an absurd myth thats been disproved so many times that its astonishing that people still make such a stupid claim. Go look up Pwn2Own, and see how vulnerable your *nix systems can be when theres a sufficient incentive to break in. Go look up the cross-platform PDF Proof of concept. Check the stats on what type of exploits are used for the majority of malware (OS / third party/browser plugin); I think you'll find that OS-level exploits are quite uncommon these days compared with the others.
...[2]....
Viruses dont do that because there is no financial gain whatsoever to killing a Bitlocker volume.
Clearly you dont work with many end users. Most that I know DO leave them plugged in; for those that dont, it tends to screw any automatic backup system they might have.
drag and drop from "My documents" to "My external drive".
Reality check: That backup system almost never works; users as a practical matter tend not to remember to do something like that, because its tedious and takes forever and requires you to do it by hand.
Suggest an automated backup solution that they can periodically check, or stop yelling at them because you failed to provide a decent solution. Crashplan is a rather good one that I recommend, because it starts reliably blasting emails out when backups dont happen, and it does "incrementals forever" in a way that has proven to be highly reliable.
Proper backups may or may not protect against this. The encryption is non-obvious, so if its with important-to-archive files that you dont use daily, it is very possible that the backups with good copies of the data will have grandfathered out by the time you realize you were hit.
WHen youre talking about revenue, its typically a yearly thing, so no, "Trillions of dollars of revenue" is not accurate for any company on the face of the earth unless you were to append "over X many years".
Are you really being so pedantic as to point out that technically I could project a revenue of several hundred million dollars over the next several decades? Noone discusses revenue in those terms.
I know someone in my church who is a state delegate, and is a member of the opposite party. Doesnt change the fact that hes generally smart, decent, and shares a lot of my values.
Your comment is waaaay too overbroad. I would wager that you do not personally know even a significant number of politicians.
Seriously, make your own damn website and stop getting pissed when people exercise their rights over their own property-- which, Id add, theyre paying for and you arent.
Slashdot Mirror
Hes protesting against surveillance of non-americans: exactly the opposite of what we should be protesting. Everyone spies, and its sort of the NSA's job. Whats not their job is to spy on Americans while bypassing the 4th amendment.
But he didnt lay out a plausible attack. He indicated that an attacker could determine your filesystem based on sector useage, but thats it. Telling how the encrypted data is laid out shouldnt help you; even if you could grab the sectors containing individual files (which should not be possible), you STILL wouldnt be any closer to breaking the encryption-- if you were, the encryption is already flawed.
What hes basically saying is that the encryption is not secret and your OS / FS may be identifiable, even if the actual data is encrypted. Thats not terribly shocking, since you could already generally tell what OS is using a particular WDE if youre using truecrypt or dm-crypt (since one is windows-only, and one is linux only, and both have identifiable bootloaders). Heck, if youre using truecrypt for WDE, the whole world ALREADY knows your filesystem: in-place encryption requires NTFS, and you cant use truecrypt WDE with anything but Windows >= XP && Windows 8. That in no way weakens the encryption.
You and he are both correct to point out to a potential encryptee (is that a word?) that TRIM does have implications for plausible deniability. Im saying that other than in crypto-geek fantasies, plausible deniability seems incredibly un-useful when your adversary is already 100% sure you're using encryption in the first place (a trivial look at the bootloader would tell them that).
If knowing how to construct a stream of contiguous, encrypted data helps you to break it easier than when it was scrambled / fragmented encrypted data, then your encryption is fundamentally broken, and turning TRIM off wont change that fact.
Otherwise there would be an option in truecrypt "please fragment my data as much as possible to make the encryption stronger".
Your links consist of truecrypt devs saying "it could be used for further analysis" without explaining what is meant by that, and some guy's random blog from 2011. Find an article from dm-crypt / truecrypt devs laying out a plausible attack, or something from a respected crypto expert (like Bruce Schneier), otherwise Im not buying it.
how do you know this?.
Ask anyone who has worked in child care. Ask parents whether boys or girls are more rambunctious. Get enough anecdotal evidence and it starts to become data.
Clearly the maternal instinct is something implanted by clever marketing towards 3 year olds.
That is not correct: its not about doing anything safely or even about wear-leveling. The filesystem is what handles writes, and it knows where is safe to write to, and wear-leveling is helped by TRIM but that is not what TRIM actually does.
TRIM simply informs the drive that it can perform an erase on a particular block when the filesystem marks it as deleted. This is so that any erases or remapping that needs to happen can e done when the drive is idle-- basically, it triggers garbage collection. With TRIM and auto-garbage collection off, the drive into a brick wall when it needs to write 10GB of data and it turns out that there are no already blanked blocks available; in that case it would have to do read-erase-writes for 10GB or more (due to amplification) worth of blocks, slowing everything to a relative crawl.
Just about everything an SSD does is improved by garbage collection, and TRIM is just OS- / FS- triggered garbage collection.
Im not entirely sure you understand what TRIM does. Its not to get rid of random writes, its to deal with a scenario where you have written and deleted 120GB from a 120GB SSD. Your OS has marked 120GB as "deleted", but those blocks are still occupied and cannot be re-written until they are first erased. This incurs a penalty, particularly since the erase block size is typically larger than the FS cluster size.
You could, I dont know, check the size of the partition on the "plausible" volume he shows you. If drive size is 500GB, and the "plausible" partition is 250, and hes using truecrypt... GEE I WONDER.
Dude, youre overstating the threat.
If the drive is encrypted, theres no more or less threat from brute-forcing.
From a plausible deniability standpoint, Im not terribly sure how helpful that is ANYWAYS. If someone wants to know if youre using truecrypt, they could, I dont know, look at the MBR and see whether its using the Truecrypt bootloader. The idea that you can say "What partition?" when goons grab your mysteriously unreadable laptop is laughable. Im sure there are super corner cases where that would be helpful, but generally if youre being held by the sorts of people who have the means and ability to do rubber hose cryptography, theyre not going to put up with your BS about "but wait look i gave you a password that boots to an Ubuntu partition which only accounts for 1/2 of the drive's size, and has no data worth encrypting whatsoever!"
Being involved with multiple organizations which employ encryption for very different reasons, none of them use plausible deniability / hidden encryptions; Id reckon because its not terribly helpful, or even plausible.
Ive heard it called Obamacare on NPR too, but no-- continue your rant.
No. That is not true. *nix email clients generally do not open attachments automatically,
Nor do windows. Cryptolocker is launched when the user opens an encrypted zip-file, then doubleclicks the "attachment.exe" inside. *nix will not protect you from that sort of thing.
While Windows, and its email clients, are more cautious there was a time when even deleting a email caused it to be opened
Thats inaccurate. There was a security bug with really old versions of outlook (pre 2003) where you could cause that behavior, but it was not a design decision. You could (rightly) criticize that bug, but its not like there havent been code execution bugs in Linux, Firefox, OSX, Safari, etc etc etc. Bringing up ~10+ year old bugs in software thats not even part of the OS as proof that Windows 7 / 8 is insecure, is not really convincing.
CryptoLocker has showed that to be the case.
Having been on a team that dealt with cryptolocker, I can say that you are not correct.
Cryptolocker often is sent as malicious executables contained in zip file email attachments, which could target Linux or OSX or AIX just as easily.
you tend to be screwed no matter how good the AV program is,
If the virus is in usermode, the AV can easily remove it no matter what measures it takes, since the AV runs with root privileges. If the virus has root, it depends on what virus and what AV and how recent each is.
The whole premise of "Windows gets viruses because its insecure" is such an absurd myth thats been disproved so many times that its astonishing that people still make such a stupid claim. Go look up Pwn2Own, and see how vulnerable your *nix systems can be when theres a sufficient incentive to break in. Go look up the cross-platform PDF Proof of concept. Check the stats on what type of exploits are used for the majority of malware (OS / third party /browser plugin); I think you'll find that OS-level exploits are quite uncommon these days compared with the others.
...[2]....
Viruses dont do that because there is no financial gain whatsoever to killing a Bitlocker volume.
Just make sure that at least 3 people have eyes on it at all times, and announce before blinking.
Laptop users that I've worked with tend to use cloud backup, which I tend to encourage because its the only way the backups get done.
Clearly you dont work with many end users. Most that I know DO leave them plugged in; for those that dont, it tends to screw any automatic backup system they might have.
drag and drop from "My documents" to "My external drive".
Reality check: That backup system almost never works; users as a practical matter tend not to remember to do something like that, because its tedious and takes forever and requires you to do it by hand.
Suggest an automated backup solution that they can periodically check, or stop yelling at them because you failed to provide a decent solution. Crashplan is a rather good one that I recommend, because it starts reliably blasting emails out when backups dont happen, and it does "incrementals forever" in a way that has proven to be highly reliable.
Proper backups may or may not protect against this. The encryption is non-obvious, so if its with important-to-archive files that you dont use daily, it is very possible that the backups with good copies of the data will have grandfathered out by the time you realize you were hit.
WHen youre talking about revenue, its typically a yearly thing, so no, "Trillions of dollars of revenue" is not accurate for any company on the face of the earth unless you were to append "over X many years".
Are you really being so pedantic as to point out that technically I could project a revenue of several hundred million dollars over the next several decades? Noone discusses revenue in those terms.
We should subsidize SSDs with taxpayer money, is what youre saying. Works for me.
Has that been tested?
I know someone in my church who is a state delegate, and is a member of the opposite party. Doesnt change the fact that hes generally smart, decent, and shares a lot of my values.
Your comment is waaaay too overbroad. I would wager that you do not personally know even a significant number of politicians.
Like the budget!
Apparently what they meant to say was that its a collaboration platform for coding, not your own personal soapbox hosted on their dollars.
But I also have the right to disagree and to boycott them.
Boycott their free product? That will show them.
No its not, its their property. XKCD said it best of all:
http://xkcd.com/1150/
Seriously, make your own damn website and stop getting pissed when people exercise their rights over their own property-- which, Id add, theyre paying for and you arent.