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Someone should write a disk formatting utility that randomizes the bits on your drive. Now you can claim that any encrypted drive (which just looks like pure n
by amelius 3mo ago
Someone should write a disk formatting utility that randomizes the bits on your drive.
Now you can claim that any encrypted drive (which just looks like pure noise if done correctly) is a drive that was just formatted.
- fhdkweig 3mo agoBe careful in countries like UK which have laws requiring the decryption of any data they find. There are people sitting in jail because they couldn't decrypt the "random noise" on their computers.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago> There are people sitting in jail because they couldn't decrypt the "random noise" on their computers. No, there isn't.
- NikolaNovak 3mo agoFair warning; any links to specific cases (not the law itself)?
- fhdkweig 3mo agoThis lists two unnamed individuals. https://edri.org/our-work/edri-gramnumber7-16decrypt-data-cases-ripa/ https://edri.org/our-work/edri-gramnumber7-16decrypt-data-ca...
- marysol5 3mo agoNone of which are what OP is claiming
- prmoustache 3mo agoThey don't mention anything about data being claimed as random noise nor the sentences.
- monster_truck 3mo agoThere literally are not. Anyone competent enough to be an expert witness will be able to plainly explain to everyone else how statistical analysis obviously delinates the difference between truly random noise and an encrypted volume.
- pixl97 3mo agoLoll, you have a lot of faith in the legal system that I do not. Expert witnesses are commonly full of shit.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoI heard one argue that "zooming" on an image by adding pixels with an algorithm is normal, and he's had such "evidence" used in court before. I was a little horrified as someone who has worked on digital forensic software at a former employer. Adding pixels to an image is not evidence, you're fabricating something out of thin air, especially if its drastically smaller, its even more likely to be BS.
- jbxntuehineoh 3mo agobut... how _else_ would you Enhance the image?
- dataflow 3mo agoAre you saying any photos I take with phone that had digital zoom is automatically I admissible? Or if not, isn't that consistent with what they said?
- monster_truck 3mo agoI didn't say all expert witnesses are good nor did I claim they are all used in good faith. Merely that, unlike in the invented scenario above, statistical differences in the random garbage that gets written to a disk across different tool or OS versions has been successfully used to place a time window on when exactly someone destroyed evidence.
- 3mo ago
- amelius 3mo agoThis is exactly the point. If storing random data was the norm (formatting utilities would offer it) then it would be hard to make a case against it. And it actually _does_ make sense for formatting utilities to offer it, as this is a good way to ensure that data is really gone after formatting (writing all 0s or all 1s could leave information at the physical layer; and any intermediate layer could not compress random data much so the data must be overwritten).
- marysol5 3mo agoWhy do people just invent this absolute bullshit. No there isn't. even people who have been prosecuted for refusing to decrypt data, it takes a lot of working by the prosecution to PROVE it's encrypted and not just "random data". I'm from the UK and have been in court with encrypted data myself.....
- prmoustache 3mo ago> There are people sitting in jail because they couldn't decrypt the "random noise" on their computers. Sources or names?
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoThat would just be dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/path/to/device
- giantg2 3mo agoSounds a lot like stenography. https://github.com/dishather/steganodisk https://github.com/dishather/steganodisk
- tptacek 3mo agoThe security track record of steganography is not great.
- giantg2 3mo agoIsn't the same true of consumer grade encryption? In a perfect world, they should be used together.
- tptacek 3mo agoDepends on what you mean, but my subtext was that a lot of steganographic designs have turned out to be detectable; it's a design-level concern, where most consumer encryption problems are implementation issues.
- kevin_thibedeau 3mo agoThis is what GNU shred does. It has a high speed PRNG meant to avoid performance issues from directly using /dev/[u]random. Point it at your preferred block device or partition and let it fill your drive with entropy. With modern flash devices there is still the issue of hidden reserved space for block replacement but you will cover most of the drive. Reduce iterations to 1 since the default is meant for legacy hard drives and will needlessly add erase cycles to flash.