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Discussion => Security => Topic started by: Heyenezz on January 23, 2012, 02:44 am

Title: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: Heyenezz on January 23, 2012, 02:44 am
From a computer science perspective, how feasible is it to design a program that encrypts your hard drive, a partition, file or whatever but that has a password for permanently deleting or corrupting the data?

A feature like this would be useful for places where police may require you to enter the password (e.g., the UK). Basically, there are two passwords for an encrypted hard drive, one that decrypts it and another that makes the data permanently inaccessible such as by corrupting the encrypted data. LEO couldn't know which password was which, so when you give them the password, you give them the one that makes the data inaccessible. Since the data is corrupted with the password, they have no way of proving whether you deliberately corrupted the data or whether it was that way already.

(You could create a hidden volume in Truecrypt but this could raise red flags if LEO notices a large amount of blank space on the drive.)

Could a program like this be made to work? Would the law still protect you if you deliberately corrupted the data using this method?

Thanks for any input.
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: SierraRS on January 24, 2012, 10:05 pm
I see such question on TrueCrypt forum every few days.

It can be implemented, but this feature will be useless. You will not type your password in your computer in police station, you will write it down to paper note if you are stupid. Then the police will type the password on copy of your data, so it will destroy the copy.

If the password is strong enough and you don't tell it to aybody, there is absolutely no need for such feature as it will be useless.
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: kmfkewm on January 24, 2012, 10:17 pm
law enforcement never do anything directly with your seized drive, they copy it using a forensic grade write blocker to make sure they don't modify a single bit of your information and then they do all of what they want to the perfect copy of your drive that they made
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: SuperDimitri on January 24, 2012, 10:25 pm
law enforcement never do anything directly with your seized drive, they copy it using a forensic grade write blocker to make sure they don't modify a single bit of your information and then they do all of what they want to the perfect copy of your drive that they made

So, does this mean that encryption a nihil?
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: mseller on January 24, 2012, 10:29 pm
That means that LE "play" with the perfect copy and original stay untouched.
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: SierraRS on January 24, 2012, 10:29 pm
Quote
law enforcement never do anything directly with your seized drive, they copy it using a forensic grade write blocker to make sure they don't modify a single bit of your information and then they do all of what they want to the perfect copy of your drive that they made
Our troll are right here. This is how LE should do it.
Quote
So, does this mean that encryption a nihil?
This means that the encryption is the thing that will prevent anyone from decrypting the contents of drive without password or encryption key.
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: kmfkewm on January 24, 2012, 10:37 pm
since when am I a troll? Also if they don't use a writeblocker and fuck with  your actual drive it isn't going to look good in court for them.
Title: Re: Like Truecrypt but with a twist?
Post by: QTC on January 24, 2012, 10:40 pm
Even podunk cops are starting to become armed with encase/ddi these days and know to work only on at least second generation copies, much less anybody that would be interested in you for distribution.