5 ms·

I am not sure that the offset in security is that small. The assumption, that your servers will only be evaluated month later doesnt hold true in most cases. At

by cf498 8y ago

I am not sure that the offset in security is that small. The assumption, that your servers will only be evaluated month later doesnt hold true in most cases. Attacking running machines quickly does happen. If your threat scenarios are little green men, they are unlikely to just shut down your server and haul it to some dark room to interrogate later. They will of course try to get the key from a running system, but thats also something you should most definitely have in your threat assessment. edit: blue men*. Forgot that green police uniforms are an outdated local thing.

jimktrains2 8y ago
Re your edit, I always thought lgm was a reference to military garb, not police. Also, many police wear black now.
- cf498 8y ago
  Makes sense, things got really butchered in the translation. Our police used to be green until, what feels like really recently. So there are still a lot of sayings around involving "the people in green". Now they are apparently blue across the EU.
- coldacid 8y ago
  To me, "little green men" meant aliens.
  - mark212 8y ago
    “Little green men” to me is a reference to the Russian army units that invaded Ukraine without insignia for deniability.
    - cf498 8y ago
      Thats a rather recent one however. The saying is rather old.
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    Usually, but in this context it's clear that it isn't.
bradleyjg 8y ago
I’ll give examples for the US but you can translate as appropriate. I’d say there’s no municipal police force in the country that has a sufficiently technically sophisticated regular law enforcement to try to attack a running machine. So if you are suspected of having information relevant to a murder or drug deal—the seize and examine one month later scenario is extremely likely. A handful of states and maybe one or two municipalities may have a computer crimes division that would be sophisticated enough to know to worry about encrypted disks, but they’d have to hire expensive outside consultants to carry out the actual attack and would do so in exceptional circumstances rather than routinely. Finally, if your threat model includes the national security apparatus then, yes, this is probably too much of a compromise.
- cf498 8y ago
  >I’d say there’s no municipal police force in the country that has a sufficiently technically sophisticated regular law enforcement to try to attack a running machine. So if you are suspected of having information relevant to a murder or drug deal—the seize and examine one month later scenario is extremely likely. I wouldnt assume that this is still the case, at least in Germany. I think the days of police shutting down the devices they have a search warrant for are pretty much over until they are confident enough that there isnt a disc encryption in place. If there is, they keep the device from going to sleep and call for an expert. If they are actually targeting server infrastructure, there will be people with technical expertise involved.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    The US can have some small police forces. Like, a handful of people independently serving a city. If they were the first to respond to a tech crime, they could probably create a mess. But in theory, they could do their own search warrants, searches, recommending prosecutions, etc.
    - bradleyjg 8y ago
      Even big police forces, e.g. NYPD, have lots of divisions. I don't think there's any standard operating procedure in place that would lead a random detective in a random precinct to call in one of the two or three experts across the entire NYPD on a case he is working that happens to involve seizure order for servers. If someone in the special city-wide child pornography unit was involved in a server seizure, that's when the computer expert might be involved (because he or she would be attached to the computer crimes division the child porn unit is a part of).
teddyh 8y ago
> They will of course try to get the key from a running system, but thats also something you should most definitely have in your threat assessment. 1. I have yet to see any indication that this is the case. 2. If you assume such technical skill in your adversaries, you must figure that they could just as well open your servers and read the file system keys right off the memory by running wires to the memory bus. In which case Mandos is no worse than no Mandos.
- cf498 8y ago
  Putting wires on the memory bus is not really needed. >1. I have yet to see any indication that this is the case. Taking memorydumps of running systems have been state of the art for about 10 years. There is a heap of commercial forensic software which are used for extracting everything from bitlocker to back then truecrypt. In 2014 it was published that the German police used ElcomSoft as well as Passware, both capable of extracting keys from running machines. I doubt you even need experts for that anymore. Police officers were already on alert to prevent you from shutting down your devices years ago in cases where they assume that there might be evidence on them. I mean we are living in a world where the police is cloning smartphones in routine controls. And on the more sophisticated site, where the police is allowed to infect suspects of even low level drug dealing with trojans. The police isnt stuck in the 90s and they are aided by a rather large sector producing forensic software as well as spyware. I understand that your product offers great convenience, however its only reasonable to point out, that the need to put in your password after the device was shut off is not a problem but working as intended. Encryption will only protect you if the device is turned off. Circumventing this is not necessarily a good idea. edit: You also dont have to assume law enforcement. The tools are also affordable for private entities and marketed towards for example towards private detectives.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    Even if your adversary have access to the latest and most sophisticated state-of-the-art tools, and have the budget for having technicians to use them, Mandos still does no harm; i.e. does not reduce security. And Mandos is not meant to defend against this; Mandos is instead meant to get people who are not using encrypted disks to start using encrypted disks, since Mandos fixes the (in my opinion) most annoying problem with using encrypted disks. You are, in effect, arguing about whether encrypted disks are useful at all, which is a debate I’m really not getting into at this time, since it has nothing to do with Mandos.

by cf498 8y ago

jimktrains2 8y ago

Re your edit, I always thought lgm was a reference to military garb, not police. Also, many police wear black now.

cf498 8y ago
Makes sense, things got really butchered in the translation. Our police used to be green until, what feels like really recently. So there are still a lot of sayings around involving "the people in green". Now they are apparently blue across the EU.
coldacid 8y ago
To me, "little green men" meant aliens.
- mark212 8y ago
  “Little green men” to me is a reference to the Russian army units that invaded Ukraine without insignia for deniability.
  - cf498 8y ago
    Thats a rather recent one however. The saying is rather old.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Usually, but in this context it's clear that it isn't.

bradleyjg 8y ago

I’ll give examples for the US but you can translate as appropriate. I’d say there’s no municipal police force in the country that has a sufficiently technically sophisticated regular law enforcement to try to attack a running machine. So if you are suspected of having information relevant to a murder or drug deal—the seize and examine one month later scenario is extremely likely. A handful of states and maybe one or two municipalities may have a computer crimes division that would be sophisticated enough to know to worry about encrypted disks, but they’d have to hire expensive outside consultants to carry out the actual attack and would do so in exceptional circumstances rather than routinely. Finally, if your threat model includes the national security apparatus then, yes, this is probably too much of a compromise.

cf498 8y ago
>I’d say there’s no municipal police force in the country that has a sufficiently technically sophisticated regular law enforcement to try to attack a running machine. So if you are suspected of having information relevant to a murder or drug deal—the seize and examine one month later scenario is extremely likely. I wouldnt assume that this is still the case, at least in Germany. I think the days of police shutting down the devices they have a search warrant for are pretty much over until they are confident enough that there isnt a disc encryption in place. If there is, they keep the device from going to sleep and call for an expert. If they are actually targeting server infrastructure, there will be people with technical expertise involved.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  The US can have some small police forces. Like, a handful of people independently serving a city. If they were the first to respond to a tech crime, they could probably create a mess. But in theory, they could do their own search warrants, searches, recommending prosecutions, etc.
  - bradleyjg 8y ago
    Even big police forces, e.g. NYPD, have lots of divisions. I don't think there's any standard operating procedure in place that would lead a random detective in a random precinct to call in one of the two or three experts across the entire NYPD on a case he is working that happens to involve seizure order for servers. If someone in the special city-wide child pornography unit was involved in a server seizure, that's when the computer expert might be involved (because he or she would be attached to the computer crimes division the child porn unit is a part of).

teddyh 8y ago

> They will of course try to get the key from a running system, but thats also something you should most definitely have in your threat assessment. 1. I have yet to see any indication that this is the case. 2. If you assume such technical skill in your adversaries, you must figure that they could just as well open your servers and read the file system keys right off the memory by running wires to the memory bus. In which case Mandos is no worse than no Mandos.

cf498 8y ago
Putting wires on the memory bus is not really needed. >1. I have yet to see any indication that this is the case. Taking memorydumps of running systems have been state of the art for about 10 years. There is a heap of commercial forensic software which are used for extracting everything from bitlocker to back then truecrypt. In 2014 it was published that the German police used ElcomSoft as well as Passware, both capable of extracting keys from running machines. I doubt you even need experts for that anymore. Police officers were already on alert to prevent you from shutting down your devices years ago in cases where they assume that there might be evidence on them. I mean we are living in a world where the police is cloning smartphones in routine controls. And on the more sophisticated site, where the police is allowed to infect suspects of even low level drug dealing with trojans. The police isnt stuck in the 90s and they are aided by a rather large sector producing forensic software as well as spyware. I understand that your product offers great convenience, however its only reasonable to point out, that the need to put in your password after the device was shut off is not a problem but working as intended. Encryption will only protect you if the device is turned off. Circumventing this is not necessarily a good idea. edit: You also dont have to assume law enforcement. The tools are also affordable for private entities and marketed towards for example towards private detectives.
- teddyh 8y ago
  Even if your adversary have access to the latest and most sophisticated state-of-the-art tools, and have the budget for having technicians to use them, Mandos still does no harm; i.e. does not reduce security. And Mandos is not meant to defend against this; Mandos is instead meant to get people who are not using encrypted disks to start using encrypted disks, since Mandos fixes the (in my opinion) most annoying problem with using encrypted disks. You are, in effect, arguing about whether encrypted disks are useful at all, which is a debate I’m really not getting into at this time, since it has nothing to do with Mandos.