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You could perfectly encrypt a hard drive such that it could decrypt to anything, but the "key" (a one-time pad) would be as big as the drive itself. All real-wo
by oconnor663 10y ago
You could perfectly encrypt a hard drive such that it could decrypt to anything, but the "key" (a one-time pad) would be as big as the drive itself. All real-world crypto software uses short keys, which are just big enough that it's impossible to brute-force guess them. In general for a given encrypted drive, there is probably no other key besides the real one that would produce meaningful looking output, because the space of all possible outputs is so much larger than the space of all possible keys.
- bluesign 10y agoIt is like splitting drive to two (interleved sectors for example) and encrypt odd sectors with key1 and evens with key2. And software can try key in first 2 sectors to figure out odds or evens to use. If software gives you an option to use 2 keys or 1 key in the beginning ( so half data will be garbage ) you can always deny you have 2 keys
- ethbro 10y agoI get the one time pad size argument (as well as the analog that a shorter key is therefore a hashing function in some respect?). The thing I found curious though is that the legal argument seems to depend not on providing your encryption key (which is generally assumed to be protected), but the act of decryption. In the absence of the key, any plaintext produced from a ciphertext is... questionable?