81–90 of 187 posts
On OSX with Lion - there is no excuse http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-e...
Microsoft BitLocker in its most secure mode is the gold standard because it protects against more attack modes than other software. Unfortunately, Microsoft has only made it available with certain versions of Microsoft Windows. Though MS says that BitLocker doesn't have back doors [1], I wonder how true this actually is... [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/si_team/archive/2006/03/02/542590.as...
Exactly. Trusting proprietary, closed source software (in other words, a third party) for encryption is missing the point of encryption so hard, it's not even funny.
They could just type any information in they wanted to, upload a picture, hit print, and the process would mail them a drivers license like everyone else.
My system triple boots into OS X, Windows and Ubuntu. I have a home partition, formatted in HFS+. What would be the best strategy for me to use? Should I just encrypt the home volume using something cross-platform like TrueCrypt, or is it practical (an maintainable) to do full-disk encryption in such an environment? My home partition has very sensitive data and I've been putting off creating a TrueCrypt container for…
Out of personal interest: Did you get Linux to mount the HFS+ partition with R/W access with journaling enabled? I am also curious if you make any progress with encrypting the entire partition.
If you go full disk encryption with TrueCrypt, make sure you look into their Hidden OS feature as well. A judge may be able to order you to give up the decryption key to the OS when accessing the drive prompts for one (last I checked the precedent is still somewhat shaky), because while they can't know what's being encrypted they can infer something readable is. They can't prove the existence of a Hidden OS, though,…
The RIP Act in the UK allows for jail time for refusing to give a key.
The point of a hidden OS is plausible deniability. When used correctly, there shouldn't be any evidence that another OS exists. For instance: what if there wasn't a hidden OS, and you do keep random data in your unused HD space? They'd be jailing you for refusing to give something that doesn't exist.
> Our calculations confirm that a relatively short series of truly randomly chosen English dictionary words is secure; many people find these somewhat more memorable. Above we used "In the jungle! The mighty Jungle, the lion sleeps tonight!" The important thing is to choose enough words and to choose them in a random un-guessable way, such as by changing the spacing, punctuation, spelling, or capitalization.
The problem with this example is that the 10 words are not chosen independently. Type "in the j" into a google search box and the whole phrase will appear in the drop-down box. So the entropy for the choice of that phrase is about lg2(37^8) or about 42 bits.
So an approximation of the total entropy is:
Choice of source phrase = lg2(37^8) ~= 41.7 bits
Choose one of the 10 suggestions from the drop-down box = lg2(10) ~= 3.3 bits
Permutation of words = lg2(10! / 2! / 3!) ~= 18.2 bits
Spacing (assume each word may independently be precedeed by a space with probability 0.5) =10 bits
Punctuation (each word may be independently followed by '!') = 10 bits
Capitalization: independently choose one of {lowercase, camelcase, uppercase) for each word = lg2(3^10) ~= 15.8 bits
Total so far: 98 bits.
Now consider the third option: a mixture of 16 independently-chosen letters, numbers and symbols. Assume most ASCII characters are available (lets eliminate single quote, backslash and $ which cause problems for some web apps) and we have
lg2(92^16) ~= 104.4 bits, which wins.
I am not convinced by one of the quiz answers: > Our calculations confirm that a relatively short series of truly randomly chosen English dictionary words is secure; many people find these somewhat more memorable. Above we used "In the jungle! The mighty Jungle, the lion sleeps tonight!" The important thing is to choose enough words and to choose them in a random un-guessable way, such as by changing the spacing, pun…
Humans are great at remembering phrases, quotes, etc. Think about how widespread referential humor is, where the joke is just a reference to/quote from another work. That's something the brain is great at. Random or semi-random jumbles of letters? Not so much.
On OSX with Lion - there is no excuse http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-e...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I intend to do the next opportunity I get. Your swap space could still leak confidential information, though.
I'm willing to risk that since I rarely use any of my swap.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedFilesystems
If you want hibernate to work you can use uswsusp for example: https://we.riseup.net/debian/encrypted-swap
Sleep always works, but as mentioned above, your key will be in memory...