9 ms·

CipherShed, the Truecrypt fork

83 points by JoachimS 12y ago

RexRollman 12y ago
I was under the impression it couldn't be forked. Incorrect?
- dm2 12y ago
  The TrueCrypt author is anonymous and would have to reveal their identity in order to enforce the license, which they would be very unlikely to do. According to CipherShed's forum the main thing they have to do is remove all references to TrueCrypt from the code: https://forum.ciphershed.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=48 https://forum.ciphershed.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=48 I'm not sure if anyone on this site is actually a TrueCrypt developer but there is a new forum: https://forum.truecrypt.ch/ https://forum.truecrypt.ch/ They have some discussion about CipherShed and some other TrueCrypt forks: https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/working-with-ciphershed/22 https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/working-with-ciphershed/22
- mholt 12y ago
  Shouldn't, but could: > On 16 June 2014, the only alleged TrueCrypt developer still answering emails, replied to an email by Matthew Green about the licensing situation. He is not willing to change the license to an open source one, believes that Truecrypt should not be forked, and that if someone wants to create a new version they should start from scratch.[1] (Copy of the email on pastebin[2]) [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt#End_of_life_and_license_version_3.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt#End_of_life_and_licen... [2]: http://pastebin.com/RS0f8gwn http://pastebin.com/RS0f8gwn
  - harshreality 12y ago
    The letter of copyright law might allow a prohibition of forking and relicensing (to reiterate, the TC author would have to reveal him or herself in order to enforce that prohibition), but philosophically... "I don't feel that forking truecrypt would be a good idea..." This is a straight-up abuse of copyright law. Author has no intent of profiting from the project, no intent of continuing to work on the project, and still waves around the hammer of copyright as if it's a fundamental right absent any connection to the constitutional qualification of promoting progress in the sciences and useful arts. To say there's a moral imperative against forking and relicensing in this scenario is stretching the rationale for the copyright monopoly quite far.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Interesting. To who else's work can you write a nerd message board post explaining your intrinsic entitlement? It's not at all shocking that the creator and maintainer of a free encrypted filesystem would eventually abandon the effort, given that comments like these are how the effort is ultimately repaid. Is there a name for the hammer you swing, the hammer not of abusing copyright but instead of not writing simulated hardware disk encryption and donating it for free? It seems to me that's a far mightier hammer than the one you described.
      - SamReidHughes 12y ago
        Uh oh, it looks like @tptacek's calling people message board nerds again.
        tptacek 12y ago
        I'm @tqbf, not @tptacek. @tptacek is some other person on Twitter.
      - tedunangst 12y ago
        From each according to their ability and all that. Oh, you can write crypto software? Therefore you must write it for me.
    - tux3 12y ago
      I'm still wondering whether this is an elaborate way to tell people that Trucrypt is completely compromised and shouldn't be used.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Of course you are. That's a fun thought experiment. Details of licensure, burned out developers, and Truecrypt's modern place among all the other encrypted storage schemes are much more boring than the cloak and dagger fiction of a Truecrypt warrant canary.
      - the_solution 12y ago
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  Actually incorrect. (Not legal advice, but read the licences yourself.) The previous version of TrueCrypt (7.1a - the one you'd actually want to fork because it could still encrypt things), was still under a licence that'd allow you to fork it as long as you didn't call it TrueCrypt (or anything resembling it). That was basically inherited from E4M. It's an ugly licence, however. https://diskcryptor.net/ https://diskcryptor.net/ might be worth looking into (this is not a recommendation, I have not audited it). It's certainly cleaner - TC's kinda ugly inside, with a decade of maint cruft.
hmhrex 12y ago
Anybody use this yet? What's the legitimacy of this compared to Truecrypt's fallen domain? I see that actually list the developers which is nice. But unfortunately I'm not too familiar with the big name's in cryptography software.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  The fact that developers are known and are mostly US based means you shouldn't trust their product. Any of them can be silenced by a secret gag order and forced to introduce a backdoor/weakness, and there isn't much they would be able to do other than move to Russia and reveal it.
- acqq 12y ago
  Reading the "news" section, they actually still haven't made any changes, they just managed to compile it! Some other place that forked the TrueCrypt sources to some repo (VeraCrypt) managed to change a few constants and make the containers incompatible. At least they addressed a known TC weakness: the low number of PBKDF2 passes. Finally, the contribution of the TruCrypt.ch (TCNext) is that they put the original sources and binaries behind a new domain name and wrote "TrueCrypt must not die." In short, it's easy to put other's work behind a new domain or in another repo, it's hard and costly to do the real development.
pliu 12y ago
I used Truecrypt heavily for years, but since all the kerfuffle happened I've switched to other stuff. I like Truecypt and would like to move back, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to trust a fork. I can't audit the code myself so I have to rely, I guess, just on mind share and the opinions of security people who are smarter than me. I'm curious about what other users are doing in this situation. What are your criteria for trusting a fork? How will you know when something (not necessarily CipherShed) is mature and safe enough to use?
- Zikes 12y ago
  What alternatives have you used?
  - pliu 12y ago
    For disk encryption on Windows, I switched to Bitlocker for my personal use. At my workplace we use Symantec Encryption and Sophos Safeguard, my understanding is they are both pretty okay. For file encryption, now I just do everything on my Ubuntu workstation and use GPG + tarballs. This is sort of a pain in the ass though, and it's not as secure as a TC container of course. It's kind of just a stop gap until I can think of something better.
    - tux 12y ago
      You think BitLocker closed-source from Micrsofot is more secure and trust worthy then open-source fork CipherShed ? I would take open-source project over closed-source any day. Linux Action Show recently talked about "Tomb", it looks like a nice alternative. https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/ https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/
      - pyre 12y ago
        It's possible for a closed-source product to be written by experts, while the open-source competitor is only written by hobbyists. When it comes to crypto, you probably want the experts. Also, someone needs to actually audit the source code for the 'open-source' part to really come into play (other than from the discontinuation of support angle). Even with open source code, it's only really been recently that TrueCrypt itself ever got any sort of in-depth audit.
jbackus 12y ago
How close is this fork to the original source? The folks behind the Open Crypto Audit Project[1] have done a fantastic job auditing the security of Truecrypt and they're now doing the cryptanalysis. While an actively maintained fork is desirable, changes to the core dependencies will eliminate the benefits of the audit. [1]: https://opencryptoaudit.org/ https://opencryptoaudit.org/
- david_shaw 12y ago
  That's very true, but if the Open Crypto Audit Project finds any TrueCrypt vulnerabilities, there will be no one around to fix them.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  IIRC, it's forked from the audited version, both as that's the last one before TC got Lavabit'd, but also because they can then get straight to work on fixing any vulns the audit finds.
geuis 12y ago
From what I understand the author(s) explicitly do not want this forked. The license has not been changed, and whatever fork this is will be from an older Linux repo.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Is this the same or different project from the TrueCryptNext one?
D4AHNGM 12y ago
Interestingly the FUSE element is going to get much more difficult come Yosemite. Apple has implemented a strict unsigned kext ban on Yosemite, and obviously FUSE relies on those kernel extensions, so effectively, building things like FUSE from source is going to get a lot more difficult for end-users. The FUSE element will still work fine if you take a signed OSXFUSE binary for example, because those binaries & the kexts within them are signed, but distributing source packages to OS X at least is going to become more painful.

83 points by JoachimS 12y ago

RexRollman 12y ago

I was under the impression it couldn't be forked. Incorrect?

dm2 12y ago
The TrueCrypt author is anonymous and would have to reveal their identity in order to enforce the license, which they would be very unlikely to do. According to CipherShed's forum the main thing they have to do is remove all references to TrueCrypt from the code: https://forum.ciphershed.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=48 https://forum.ciphershed.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=48 I'm not sure if anyone on this site is actually a TrueCrypt developer but there is a new forum: https://forum.truecrypt.ch/ https://forum.truecrypt.ch/ They have some discussion about CipherShed and some other TrueCrypt forks: https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/working-with-ciphershed/22 https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/working-with-ciphershed/22
mholt 12y ago
Shouldn't, but could: > On 16 June 2014, the only alleged TrueCrypt developer still answering emails, replied to an email by Matthew Green about the licensing situation. He is not willing to change the license to an open source one, believes that Truecrypt should not be forked, and that if someone wants to create a new version they should start from scratch.[1] (Copy of the email on pastebin[2]) [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt#End_of_life_and_license_version_3.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt#End_of_life_and_licen... [2]: http://pastebin.com/RS0f8gwn http://pastebin.com/RS0f8gwn
- harshreality 12y ago
  The letter of copyright law might allow a prohibition of forking and relicensing (to reiterate, the TC author would have to reveal him or herself in order to enforce that prohibition), but philosophically... "I don't feel that forking truecrypt would be a good idea..." This is a straight-up abuse of copyright law. Author has no intent of profiting from the project, no intent of continuing to work on the project, and still waves around the hammer of copyright as if it's a fundamental right absent any connection to the constitutional qualification of promoting progress in the sciences and useful arts. To say there's a moral imperative against forking and relicensing in this scenario is stretching the rationale for the copyright monopoly quite far.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Interesting. To who else's work can you write a nerd message board post explaining your intrinsic entitlement? It's not at all shocking that the creator and maintainer of a free encrypted filesystem would eventually abandon the effort, given that comments like these are how the effort is ultimately repaid. Is there a name for the hammer you swing, the hammer not of abusing copyright but instead of not writing simulated hardware disk encryption and donating it for free? It seems to me that's a far mightier hammer than the one you described.
    - SamReidHughes 12y ago
      Uh oh, it looks like @tptacek's calling people message board nerds again.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        I'm @tqbf, not @tptacek. @tptacek is some other person on Twitter.
    - tedunangst 12y ago
      From each according to their ability and all that. Oh, you can write crypto software? Therefore you must write it for me.
  - tux3 12y ago
    I'm still wondering whether this is an elaborate way to tell people that Trucrypt is completely compromised and shouldn't be used.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Of course you are. That's a fun thought experiment. Details of licensure, burned out developers, and Truecrypt's modern place among all the other encrypted storage schemes are much more boring than the cloak and dagger fiction of a Truecrypt warrant canary.
    - the_solution 12y ago
AlyssaRowan 12y ago
Actually incorrect. (Not legal advice, but read the licences yourself.) The previous version of TrueCrypt (7.1a - the one you'd actually want to fork because it could still encrypt things), was still under a licence that'd allow you to fork it as long as you didn't call it TrueCrypt (or anything resembling it). That was basically inherited from E4M. It's an ugly licence, however. https://diskcryptor.net/ https://diskcryptor.net/ might be worth looking into (this is not a recommendation, I have not audited it). It's certainly cleaner - TC's kinda ugly inside, with a decade of maint cruft.

hmhrex 12y ago

Anybody use this yet? What's the legitimacy of this compared to Truecrypt's fallen domain? I see that actually list the developers which is nice. But unfortunately I'm not too familiar with the big name's in cryptography software.

imaginenore 12y ago
The fact that developers are known and are mostly US based means you shouldn't trust their product. Any of them can be silenced by a secret gag order and forced to introduce a backdoor/weakness, and there isn't much they would be able to do other than move to Russia and reveal it.
acqq 12y ago
Reading the "news" section, they actually still haven't made any changes, they just managed to compile it! Some other place that forked the TrueCrypt sources to some repo (VeraCrypt) managed to change a few constants and make the containers incompatible. At least they addressed a known TC weakness: the low number of PBKDF2 passes. Finally, the contribution of the TruCrypt.ch (TCNext) is that they put the original sources and binaries behind a new domain name and wrote "TrueCrypt must not die." In short, it's easy to put other's work behind a new domain or in another repo, it's hard and costly to do the real development.

pliu 12y ago

I used Truecrypt heavily for years, but since all the kerfuffle happened I've switched to other stuff. I like Truecypt and would like to move back, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to trust a fork. I can't audit the code myself so I have to rely, I guess, just on mind share and the opinions of security people who are smarter than me. I'm curious about what other users are doing in this situation. What are your criteria for trusting a fork? How will you know when something (not necessarily CipherShed) is mature and safe enough to use?

Zikes 12y ago
What alternatives have you used?
- pliu 12y ago
  For disk encryption on Windows, I switched to Bitlocker for my personal use. At my workplace we use Symantec Encryption and Sophos Safeguard, my understanding is they are both pretty okay. For file encryption, now I just do everything on my Ubuntu workstation and use GPG + tarballs. This is sort of a pain in the ass though, and it's not as secure as a TC container of course. It's kind of just a stop gap until I can think of something better.
  - tux 12y ago
    You think BitLocker closed-source from Micrsofot is more secure and trust worthy then open-source fork CipherShed ? I would take open-source project over closed-source any day. Linux Action Show recently talked about "Tomb", it looks like a nice alternative. https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/ https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/
    - pyre 12y ago
      It's possible for a closed-source product to be written by experts, while the open-source competitor is only written by hobbyists. When it comes to crypto, you probably want the experts. Also, someone needs to actually audit the source code for the 'open-source' part to really come into play (other than from the discontinuation of support angle). Even with open source code, it's only really been recently that TrueCrypt itself ever got any sort of in-depth audit.

jbackus 12y ago

How close is this fork to the original source? The folks behind the Open Crypto Audit Project[1] have done a fantastic job auditing the security of Truecrypt and they're now doing the cryptanalysis. While an actively maintained fork is desirable, changes to the core dependencies will eliminate the benefits of the audit. [1]: https://opencryptoaudit.org/ https://opencryptoaudit.org/

david_shaw 12y ago
That's very true, but if the Open Crypto Audit Project finds any TrueCrypt vulnerabilities, there will be no one around to fix them.
blueskin_ 12y ago
IIRC, it's forked from the audited version, both as that's the last one before TC got Lavabit'd, but also because they can then get straight to work on fixing any vulns the audit finds.

geuis 12y ago

From what I understand the author(s) explicitly do not want this forked. The license has not been changed, and whatever fork this is will be from an older Linux repo.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Is this the same or different project from the TrueCryptNext one?

D4AHNGM 12y ago

Interestingly the FUSE element is going to get much more difficult come Yosemite. Apple has implemented a strict unsigned kext ban on Yosemite, and obviously FUSE relies on those kernel extensions, so effectively, building things like FUSE from source is going to get a lot more difficult for end-users. The FUSE element will still work fine if you take a signed OSXFUSE binary for example, because those binaries & the kexts within them are signed, but distributing source packages to OS X at least is going to become more painful.