3 ms·

Wow! I was reading the comments on the blog posting, and the signal-to-noise ratio was shockingly low. I would have thought Schneier readers to be a bit more

Wow! I was reading the comments on the blog posting, and the signal-to-noise ratio was shockingly low. I would have thought Schneier readers to be a bit more clueful. It seems that using a security-less memory stick/usb drive/etc. with an open source cryptographic package might be one's best bet. What are some good options?

blasdel 17y ago
Use the open source and cross-platform TrueCrypt. Don't trust that some company's Taiwanese sub-sub-vendor has any competency at software development.
iuguy 17y ago
Actually using software-based encryption is fraught with problems. What if the person you're sharing the disk with can't install the crypto software? What if the person you're sharing with copies the crypto container off the disk whilst it's plugged in and uses a keystroke logger? An ideal solution for sensitive data is something that does hardware encryption on chip, uses a read-only partition with a container application and provides two-factor authentication - and doesn't send a static hash over the USB channel. I evaluated MXI's Stealth MXP a while back. There was a later firmware version that sent the hash over the USB channel but the version I reviewed was good - although I think they only make the bio in that series now and haven't evaluated the new Stealth M - http://www.mxisecurity.com/ http://www.mxisecurity.com/
- ajross 17y ago
  To be fair: if the recipient can't access the data, that may be a problem but it's not a security failure. In general, applications that have strong security requirements are usually willing to deal with a little hassle to get it. The whole idea of doing the encryption on the drive was to reduce the hassle of making users do encryption. And it turned out to introduce a fatal bug. I don't see how your other suggestions are going to provide any more more resistance against security bugs than this drive had. But being hardware solutions, I can guarantee that they will be much less verifiably secury -- thus making it much more likely they'll reach market before the flaw is discovered. Software is more robust in that sense.

blasdel 17y ago

Use the open source and cross-platform TrueCrypt. Don't trust that some company's Taiwanese sub-sub-vendor has any competency at software development.

iuguy 17y ago

Actually using software-based encryption is fraught with problems. What if the person you're sharing the disk with can't install the crypto software? What if the person you're sharing with copies the crypto container off the disk whilst it's plugged in and uses a keystroke logger? An ideal solution for sensitive data is something that does hardware encryption on chip, uses a read-only partition with a container application and provides two-factor authentication - and doesn't send a static hash over the USB channel. I evaluated MXI's Stealth MXP a while back. There was a later firmware version that sent the hash over the USB channel but the version I reviewed was good - although I think they only make the bio in that series now and haven't evaluated the new Stealth M - http://www.mxisecurity.com/ http://www.mxisecurity.com/

ajross 17y ago
To be fair: if the recipient can't access the data, that may be a problem but it's not a security failure. In general, applications that have strong security requirements are usually willing to deal with a little hassle to get it. The whole idea of doing the encryption on the drive was to reduce the hassle of making users do encryption. And it turned out to introduce a fatal bug. I don't see how your other suggestions are going to provide any more more resistance against security bugs than this drive had. But being hardware solutions, I can guarantee that they will be much less verifiably secury -- thus making it much more likely they'll reach market before the flaw is discovered. Software is more robust in that sense.