3 ms·

This is already tested somewhat in the UK, where you're required by law to provide a password to an encrypted file or volume when asked. If you're in possession

by 93po 3y ago

This is already tested somewhat in the UK, where you're required by law to provide a password to an encrypted file or volume when asked. If you're in possession of the encrypted volume, the courts assume you know the password, and throw you in jail if you don't. Obviously this can be easily abused by slipping an encrypted USB drive into someone's backpack. The point is that they will look at intention and surrounding context - is there a crime leading to you in some way and could it have been facilitated in part by encrypted messaging? Did you also transit a billion random Spanish words during this time frame? If so, it seems to follow by their current laws and logic that they can assume this was encrypted information and therefore broke the law. And if you refuse to decrypt it for them, that's another broken law.

tiku 3y ago
Perhaps we need to make a special decrypt program, one that accepts any password and just produces some log files. They can't prove it is not the data (except by claiming they planted it)..
- coppsilgold 3y ago
  > They can't prove it is not the data Encryption is the one-to-one mapping of a set of bytes to a set of bytes. Software + key is the mapping function. When doing cryptographic forensics you don't use the user's software, you use your own. So proving that the user's decryption program is fake is trivial and may not even come up as you wouldn't bother running it. And you can't choose keys in a way that would alter the byte mapping in a way that you can control, the true key will map to the true data, and anything else will map to random bytes.
  - frankish 3y ago
    What if I use my own proprietary encryption algorithm? If I don't specify a file extension, then how could they tell what algorithm is used -- it's just a scramble of bytes. In fact, what if encryption one day gets so good we cannot distinguish it from plain English? Kinda like trying to spot LLM generated content.
- luxcem 3y ago
  Sounds like steganography, it should be possible to encrypt and merge two files, with one key for each file.
- 93po 3y ago
  This is done on projects like VeraCrypt with hidden containers to give you plausible deniability - one password opens the decoy container and another opens the real one. Of course this means a ton of wasted space on the disk, and as soon as you boot the decoy container it starts desytroying hidden container data. And also there's apparently ways to detect hidden containers if this is to be believed: https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1542&context=eispapers1 https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredi... Wildly unrealistic but it exists.
1827163 3y ago
I recommend filling up the empty space on hard drives and flash drives with random data from /dev/urandom. What is the government going to do, try and get you to decrypt that? On my computer I already have several terabytes of completely random data. Decrypt that, thought police.
- pnt12 3y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538 https://xkcd.com/538 If encryption is illegal, you are suspected of having to encrypted data and don't provide the keys, the police won't be puzzling about what's random or encrypted bytes: they'll interrogate you, abuse you and throw you into jail.
  - 1827163 3y ago
    There is no law in the UK making it illegal to possess random data. And I strongly encourage other people to use the "dd" command and create some large random files on their own computer, themselves. It's a perfectly legal form of protest. The more people that do so, the less these key disclosure laws can be enforced? In fact it would be really nice if Android smartphones, when encryption is enabled, fill up all the unused space with random data. I wonder if they do that already or not? Even better would be have the operating systems fill up the unused space with random data upon partitioning the disk, by default. SSDs are very fast nowadays so it doesn't really take too much time to do so. This random data filling could even be implemented by SSD controller firmware. Any SSD firmware developers here, please consider doing this by default, as it would severely impact the ability of the government to violate our rights. If AES crypto hardware is available, just use a random key, and let the hardware generate a stream of encrypted zeros. Also if you run a Web site, you can generate chunks of random data dynamically each time and serve it up to the users. That way it will end up being stored in peoples' browser caches worldwide. Even a couple of kilobytes at a time would be fine. This can be embedded in HTML files, added as dummy data in video files, music files, JPEG, PNG, etc. Again, this is all perfectly legal to do. Transmission and possession of random data is not illegal. So anywhere you can, if it's cheap to do, don't pad it with zeros, pad it with random numbers instead! You can even do it with RAM, because it will likely end up in the swap space at some point. https://lemire.me/blog/2018/06/07/vectorizing-random-number-generators-for-greater-speed-pcg-and-xorshift128-avx-512-edition/ https://lemire.me/blog/2018/06/07/vectorizing-random-number-... https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/jj4j47/arx_based_fast_prng_updgradable_to_csprng/ https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/jj4j47/arx_based_fa... When nearly every computer or embedded device out there contains large quantities of random data on it's disk, these "key disclosure laws" will be rendered completely useless.

by 93po 3y ago

tiku 3y ago

Perhaps we need to make a special decrypt program, one that accepts any password and just produces some log files. They can't prove it is not the data (except by claiming they planted it)..

coppsilgold 3y ago
> They can't prove it is not the data Encryption is the one-to-one mapping of a set of bytes to a set of bytes. Software + key is the mapping function. When doing cryptographic forensics you don't use the user's software, you use your own. So proving that the user's decryption program is fake is trivial and may not even come up as you wouldn't bother running it. And you can't choose keys in a way that would alter the byte mapping in a way that you can control, the true key will map to the true data, and anything else will map to random bytes.
- frankish 3y ago
  What if I use my own proprietary encryption algorithm? If I don't specify a file extension, then how could they tell what algorithm is used -- it's just a scramble of bytes. In fact, what if encryption one day gets so good we cannot distinguish it from plain English? Kinda like trying to spot LLM generated content.
luxcem 3y ago
Sounds like steganography, it should be possible to encrypt and merge two files, with one key for each file.
93po 3y ago
This is done on projects like VeraCrypt with hidden containers to give you plausible deniability - one password opens the decoy container and another opens the real one. Of course this means a ton of wasted space on the disk, and as soon as you boot the decoy container it starts desytroying hidden container data. And also there's apparently ways to detect hidden containers if this is to be believed: https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1542&context=eispapers1 https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredi... Wildly unrealistic but it exists.

1827163 3y ago

I recommend filling up the empty space on hard drives and flash drives with random data from /dev/urandom. What is the government going to do, try and get you to decrypt that? On my computer I already have several terabytes of completely random data. Decrypt that, thought police.

pnt12 3y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538 https://xkcd.com/538 If encryption is illegal, you are suspected of having to encrypted data and don't provide the keys, the police won't be puzzling about what's random or encrypted bytes: they'll interrogate you, abuse you and throw you into jail.
- 1827163 3y ago
  There is no law in the UK making it illegal to possess random data. And I strongly encourage other people to use the "dd" command and create some large random files on their own computer, themselves. It's a perfectly legal form of protest. The more people that do so, the less these key disclosure laws can be enforced? In fact it would be really nice if Android smartphones, when encryption is enabled, fill up all the unused space with random data. I wonder if they do that already or not? Even better would be have the operating systems fill up the unused space with random data upon partitioning the disk, by default. SSDs are very fast nowadays so it doesn't really take too much time to do so. This random data filling could even be implemented by SSD controller firmware. Any SSD firmware developers here, please consider doing this by default, as it would severely impact the ability of the government to violate our rights. If AES crypto hardware is available, just use a random key, and let the hardware generate a stream of encrypted zeros. Also if you run a Web site, you can generate chunks of random data dynamically each time and serve it up to the users. That way it will end up being stored in peoples' browser caches worldwide. Even a couple of kilobytes at a time would be fine. This can be embedded in HTML files, added as dummy data in video files, music files, JPEG, PNG, etc. Again, this is all perfectly legal to do. Transmission and possession of random data is not illegal. So anywhere you can, if it's cheap to do, don't pad it with zeros, pad it with random numbers instead! You can even do it with RAM, because it will likely end up in the swap space at some point. https://lemire.me/blog/2018/06/07/vectorizing-random-number-generators-for-greater-speed-pcg-and-xorshift128-avx-512-edition/ https://lemire.me/blog/2018/06/07/vectorizing-random-number-... https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/jj4j47/arx_based_fast_prng_updgradable_to_csprng/ https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/jj4j47/arx_based_fa... When nearly every computer or embedded device out there contains large quantities of random data on it's disk, these "key disclosure laws" will be rendered completely useless.