4 ms·

Reading the report at its face, it doesn't say the encrypted data was obtained. It says: 1. Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data

Reading the report at its face, it doesn't say the encrypted data was obtained. It says: 1. Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data 2. "of which only 20 have been accessed to date." 3. She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains "approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level." 4. Goode said the process to decode the material was complex and that "so far only 75 documents have been reconstructed since the property was initially received." Let's assume (as a possibility) that: 1. It's a 60GB hard drive 2. It has a 40GB Truecrypt partition 3. There are deleted files on the 20GB partition that were not securely erased This theory does not explain everything, but might it be plausible?

sounds 13y ago
Yes, absolutely. Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access." That's government-speak for "resort to brute force." The ability to break RSA would do the government more damage than it would do Miranda. If they have broken RSA they aren't admitting it. Perhaps Miranda needed to transfer some of his sensitive data to a machine he couldn't supply the password to. (Maybe he thought the machine might be unsafe or keylogged etc.) Or maybe the 20 GB partition was his "plausible deniability" partition and he surrendered that key to avoid getting arrested. After moving the files to his unencrypted partition, he could access them on any machine by simply plugging in the hard drive. He should have securely erased the data after he was done, yes, but that can be difficult when traveling. This can be seen as an interesting commentary on the legitimate usability problems with using crypto, even though the crypto itself is doing its job just fine.
- nextstep 13y ago
  TrueCrypt doesn't use RSA or any asymmetric cryptography.

sounds 13y ago

Yes, absolutely. Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access." That's government-speak for "resort to brute force." The ability to break RSA would do the government more damage than it would do Miranda. If they have broken RSA they aren't admitting it. Perhaps Miranda needed to transfer some of his sensitive data to a machine he couldn't supply the password to. (Maybe he thought the machine might be unsafe or keylogged etc.) Or maybe the 20 GB partition was his "plausible deniability" partition and he surrendered that key to avoid getting arrested. After moving the files to his unencrypted partition, he could access them on any machine by simply plugging in the hard drive. He should have securely erased the data after he was done, yes, but that can be difficult when traveling. This can be seen as an interesting commentary on the legitimate usability problems with using crypto, even though the crypto itself is doing its job just fine.

nextstep 13y ago
TrueCrypt doesn't use RSA or any asymmetric cryptography.