21–30 of 175 posts
Plausible deniability requires people to believe that you don't know about any so called "hidden" volumes. That goes out the window once you buy Hidden Drive from Hidden Drive Company.
If you're using off-the-shelf "hidden" encrypted volume schemes, you're not going to be evading state-level adversaries; if you can find these projects and conveniently use them, state vendors can and will write scanners that find them. They're paid to do it; new detections are how they get to charge for maintenance and new versions. Then you're down to two issues: (1) Concealing an encrypted volume jacks suspicion w…
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.
If you rented 8 MI300X's or the nvidia equivalent, I don't even think an unreasonably long password would matter.
It should finish quickly enough that you would be upset with all of the money you have now wasted by having to commit to a month of utilization
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Be 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be 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.
Fair warning; any links to specific cases (not the law itself)?
https://edri.org/our-work/edri-gramnumber7-16decrypt-data-ca...
You should be using a TPM so such an attack is impossible. The TPM should be what is rate limiting the guesses. You don't need a KDF here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you're using off-the-shelf "hidden" encrypted volume schemes, you're not going to be evading state-level adversaries; This would evade 99% of them. Most "state-level" adversaries are just high school dropouts working border jobs told to "investigate suspicious things". I once had a police officer literally raid my room for drugs during a massive party we were throwing in university, for example. They took everyth…
> Most "state-level" adversaries are just high school dropouts working border jobs told to "investigate suspicious things". The state-level threat isn't just about the direct employees' competence. They also have the funding to purchase tools made by people who really know what they are doing. Think of things like Pegasus spyware or Darksword iPhone hacking. I can believe that a keystone cop wouldn't know the differe…
If you're using off-the-shelf "hidden" encrypted volume schemes, you're not going to be evading state-level adversaries; if you can find these projects and conveniently use them, state vendors can and will write scanners that find them. They're paid to do it; new detections are how they get to charge for maintenance and new versions. Then you're down to two issues: (1) Concealing an encrypted volume jacks suspicion w…
Basically evading a state-level actor is going to be hard. People do get lucky but to evade them in a straight-up contest you need to very clever (if it's possible at all). Given that, I just dunno how useful it is to emblazen warnings on AES-based encryption schemes that it won't fool the NSA. Either the person reading it is not technically equipped to evaluate the claims and may be scared off of a solution that protects against some adversaries while searching for an impossible zero-config state-proof solution. Or the person already knew as soon as they saw 'AES' that this isn't the project they need.
I don't mean to denigrate the inclination to highlight weaknesses like this - good communication around this is genuinely challenging.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you're using off-the-shelf "hidden" encrypted volume schemes, you're not going to be evading state-level adversaries; This would evade 99% of them. Most "state-level" adversaries are just high school dropouts working border jobs told to "investigate suspicious things". I once had a police officer literally raid my room for drugs during a massive party we were throwing in university, for example. They took everyth…
> It didn't look like anything they had seen before so they didn't think anything of it. You will miss your government's incompetence when they start rectifying these failures. I know I do. They are the tyrants who oppress us with a clean conscience. They never rest and have infinite money. Their occasional episodes of bumbling incompetence is the only respite, but those won't last. Especially now with AI to think fo…
I guess it's human nature to build the Torment Nexus.
If you're using off-the-shelf "hidden" encrypted volume schemes, you're not going to be evading state-level adversaries; if you can find these projects and conveniently use them, state vendors can and will write scanners that find them. They're paid to do it; new detections are how they get to charge for maintenance and new versions. Then you're down to two issues: (1) Concealing an encrypted volume jacks suspicion w…
I often see comments like this on encryption related project. Depending on the reader you make what might be an essential point - but I also don't really know how useful it is to say it here. The author makes no claims about what adversaries this should be sufficient against and is completely open about their constraints and decisions (allowing you to make the critique in the first place). Basically evading a state-l…
I think this post is a fun technical case study on its own. It only takes on urgency because it literally markets itself as a tool to slip past state adversaries. I think it's important that people understand that it isn't the state itself that's going to take the time to detect something like this; it's some commercial forensics vendor they use automatically.