4 ms·

But that doesn't really give the attacker much, if they just scramble an encrypted container no? They can't really do much by doing that.

• drdaeman 9y ago
  Well, there was a problem with CBC, where an attack exists that malicious party may flip specific bits by somehow XORing inputs (I'm not a cryptographer and haven't grokked the details properly). If attacker has a good idea what the plaintext is, they may alter it, like, replace my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys with theirs - and that would be really bad. Such attacks is AFAIK not possible with XTS, though, so irrelevant to VeraCrypt. Just an example. All I've got is that this stuff is not as simple as "it's either encrypted and safe or not". There are tons of different algorithms (cipher modes etc) with different properties, assumptions about their use and possible attack scenarios. While this may not give much, I still don't want anyone to mess with my files without me (or, better say, my software) noticing until it's too late and backups are also corrupt. And remote storage knows exactly where I'm writing to (with block-level granularity), so the encrypted blob isn't completely opaque.