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My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

rootkitlabs.com

151–160 of 175 posts

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#151
post #15

A very interesting solution! If you can do without Windows, I would say formatting a USB with a first partition as an 8 gig DOS partition and a 2nd partition as Linux LUKS may work just a good. But a few people may know about Linux. So if on OpenBSD, you can create a second OpenBSD encrypted partition. I think that will probably look like garbage to 99.999% of the people you may be hiding from. Be aware, if dealing w…

Hmm, a partition of any sort has mapped the territory.

[deleted]

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#152
post #15

A very interesting solution! If you can do without Windows, I would say formatting a USB with a first partition as an 8 gig DOS partition and a 2nd partition as Linux LUKS may work just a good. But a few people may know about Linux. So if on OpenBSD, you can create a second OpenBSD encrypted partition. I think that will probably look like garbage to 99.999% of the people you may be hiding from. Be aware, if dealing w…

But this partition would be visible. The OP had a version that is invisible.

rue, but I think if crossing a border, this would be enough to get by. I doubt the border guards would know what fdisk is showing and you can say "that was there when I bought it".

But the big question would the guards even know about fdisk type utilities ?

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#153
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was building a black box to detect hidden data on a USB stick, I'd include a feature whereby it measures power consumption and flags USB drives that don't consume the expected power for that type of drive.

laughs in that flash drive I have that just gets hot instead of working

https://usbkill.com/

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a difference visible, that's a weakness in the encryption algorithm. Encrypted data should be statistically indistinct from random noise. It's an information theory thing. Everything in the ciphertext should be sitting at maximum entropy.

Try it for yourself brother, there is a plainly obvious difference between the random noise of writing garbage compared to a properly encrypted binary. There are even statistically measurable differences in the garbage written across versions of a tool or OS, which, unlike the invented scenario above, has been successfully used to place a time window on when exactly someone destroyed evidence.

I'm a security researcher.

"Garbage" isn't the same thing as random noise.

I have looked at the entropy graphs of encrypted data commonly. It's one of the first things I look at when looking at a new firmware image I haven't seen before.

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#155

I want something like this in a keyboard: a completely hidden drive that the OS cannot see until I type in a certain string of characters (password) to activate it with a separate string of characters to deactivate it.

That is actually what my company built. The primary purpose was for encrypted messaging, but it also acted as secrets store and password manager. The great thing about it being built into the keyboard is there is no chance for a rooted host to intercept passwords/messages etc.

https://www.anomie.tech/

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they disassemble this drive, a forensic dump will only show the open partition.

A cursory X-Ray would show the internal SD. This product needs a hardware re-design (which I've seen other projects do) to have onboard flash instead. Saying that, any proper investigation would read the firmware from the flash and identify the decryption routing anyway

It has an SD card because proper flash is expensive. Surely the people making "4TB" flash drives on Temu must be using the same methods, or else they will be soon.

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#158
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of FAT32, use the flash drive mapping. Flash drive contain mapping from sectors to blocks. This is used to deal with flash erasure, wear leveling, and failures. Custom firmware could map the real filesystem to bad blocks. Does the forensic software read the whole physical flash drive or just the logical one? They might if they want to get deleted files. Can they detect that there are lots of failures?

You need the wear levelling system for actual wear leveling, otherwise the drive won't last very long. Competent forensic analysis can check the firmware and the physical flash contents, although most forensic analysis is not especially competent.

wait, so the device has "good" blocks and "worn out" blocks... sounds like a binary format to me, maybe you could encrypt the data in that format...

You can ship my genius award to me at X..x>X..X.

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#159
> "Many places don’t respect privacy laws, in certain situations you may be forced to unencrypt your media, or worse, assumed to be guilty. A Veracrypt hidden volume is useful in the former situation, but not the latter. This is why I made Phantomdrive."

Can someone explain to me how this project is different than a Veracrypt hidden volume and also what he means that Veracrypt wouldn't help if you are assumed to be guilty? I thought Veracrypt hidden volumes aren't visible.

Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

#160
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is self-soothing, not a real security plan. It doesn't matter how competent a security agency is, because there's a whole ecosystem of vendors selling into that space; knowledge of how to attack encrypted disks like this is outsourced, and, importantly, those firms have incentives to mop up even random stuff like this, because vendors will be selected in part based on lists of how many different circumvention an…

This isn't stand-up-to-state-actors security. This is keep-state-actors-from-noticing security. They know you're guilty, they'll get it. The XKCD version of password cracking works no matter how secure your hardware. But while states realistically can crack most anything it doesn't mean they can crack *every*thing. There are simply too many flash drives crossing the border every day. But there is a big flaw I see: 8g…

It would be less suspicious if the drive advertised 512GB and returned garbage data for any read past 8GB
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