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Deniability and Duress

mit.edu

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Re: Deniability and Duress

#111

Post by jacobush »

SilasX wrote: post #109
kilotaras wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truecrypt didn't generate fake date, you (the user) did. E.g. put porn on "show to thugs" partition and "Death star plans" on "true" encrypted partition.

Yeah, I know. My point is that it's hard to generate a plausible alternate dataset for something like that. "So, the decrypted hard drive says that you used the computer exactly once to put pornography on the computer and then never use it again ..."

Poop porn? Also, besides keeping that, and starting VLC muted in the background from time to time to keep plausibility, you would use the porn tainted partition for your everyday stuff. Hacker news, etc.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#112

Post by jacobush »

mulmen wrote: post #93
michaelt wrote: post #55

The first two paragraphs of the article are about a journalist covering war crimes exiting a country and being searched. Fifth amendment distinctions between passwords and fingerprints aren't a solution to the problems in Egypt, China and Turkey as those countries aren't subject to US law. In that situation, from one perspective a duress code that wiped the phone might seem useful - it would establish that there's no…

Could a cooperative effort to create a plausible body of work help in these situations? A journalist could keep a plausible number of canned stories on their machine and when the duress code is triggered everyone stops using them and more are written to take their place. What level of quality in the writing is needed? Can some kind of news aggregating algorithm generate plausible stories? Some kind of propaganda bot…

More coffee and more movies. :) How about some real canned stories but of less devastating effect.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#113

Post by jacobush »

rl3 wrote: post #110
monochromatic wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has zero national security value I'm against it too, but of course it has more than zero national security value.

How so? Unless a terrorist or spy is exceptionally stupid, they're not going to be carrying anything of value on their phone through a border checkpoint.

There are stupid terrorists. However, one could argue the value to national security is negative, because of drag on the economy, resentment, and because these resources could be better spent elsewhere. Like training our own real life spies.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#114

Post by afandian »

angry_octet wrote: post #101
afandian wrote: post #36

I travel to the US semi-regularly. I never have trouble. Though it's a shame to have to mention it, I was born in the UK and have white skin. My colleague, who was also born in the UK but has darker skin, was detained for half an hour last time we crossed the border. I'm a classic "nothing to hide". But I am seriously considering taking no electronics with me next time I cross the border. Might make work more of a ha…

You'll be flagged as someone who has something to hide because you had no phone. Just get a travel phone and another set of accounts (email/fb), use them occasionally, take some silly instagram photos of dogs/face swaps/food and you're done.

Yeah maybe. But I don't do any web, email or social media on my phone anyway (I used to, heavily, but it wasn't a positive thing in my life so I cut it out. That's a separate issue).

Re dog photos, as others have said, falsifying anything is a very bad idea.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#115

Post by sokoloff »

rl3 wrote: post #110
monochromatic wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has zero national security value I'm against it too, but of course it has more than zero national security value.

How so? Unless a terrorist or spy is exceptionally stupid, they're not going to be carrying anything of value on their phone through a border checkpoint.

I wouldn't underestimate the propensity of humans of all sorts to act against their own interests in service of laziness.

State-sponsored agents are less likely to be lazy and more likely to follow SOPs, but the average person (law abiding or not) is likely to be lazy/sloppy a lot.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#116

Post by shabble »

mspecter wrote: post #71

Hi, author here. Really happy (but somewhat surprised) to see this up on HN, and am generally interested in pursing this as a PhD thesis topic. If anyone has ideas or thoughts on novel systems in this arena I’d be very interested to hear about it!

Not novel, but not widely known about is the (original?) Rubberhose File System[1], where you can have a number of deniable partitions, and adversaries shouldn't ever be entirely certain you've given up all of them.

[1] site seems to be dead, but still on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709155818/http://iq.org/~pr...

Re: Deniability and Duress

#117

Post by pessimizer »

shabble wrote: post #116
mspecter wrote: post #71

Hi, author here. Really happy (but somewhat surprised) to see this up on HN, and am generally interested in pursing this as a PhD thesis topic. If anyone has ideas or thoughts on novel systems in this arena I’d be very interested to hear about it!

Not novel, but not widely known about is the (original?) Rubberhose File System[1], where you can have a number of deniable partitions, and adversaries shouldn't ever be entirely certain you've given up all of them. [1] site seems to be dead, but still on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709155818/http://iq.org/~pr...

Also, proff is Julian Assange.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#118

Post by pessimizer »

mirimir wrote: post #107
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really bad people, are probably at that point going torture you just to make an example of you to discourage others from doing the same.

Yeah, that's the downside of carrying stuff that you can't decrypt. They won't believe you, and won't stop until you decrypt it. Better is not to have anything sensitive with you.

Encrypted volumes look random. There's no way of proving whether or not you have something you can't decrypt. Hence the need to have some innocent volume to decrypt as a tool in the argument to convince an interrogator that you have nothing left to hide.

Re: Deniability and Duress

#119

Post by tzs »

How did journalists deal with this in the pre-digital days, when their notes would have been on paper and their photographs on rolls of film?

Re: Deniability and Duress

#120

Post by BentFranklin »

golergka wrote: post #52

I find it funny how you either concentrate on examples backing up one side of the debate (journalist vs political persecution) or another (pedophile ring), but almost nobody in this debate dares to propose legal and technological solutions that would be reasonable to both of these extreme examples.

Just make them available to everybody.
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