Rule no. 1: you don't announce your security by obscurity methods :)
My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
11–20 of 175 posts
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#12If 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.
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.
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#13Good stuff! If I remember correctly there was company at Defcon selling memory cards that had this feature built into them a couple years ago?
I miss TrueCrypts alt boot option. You enter a specific password it boots an alt OS so you could have an automatic alternative thing if under duress.
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#14If 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…
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Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#15A 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 with a sophisticated Gov agency, all bets are off.
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#16If 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…
> 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.
How would those scanners work? If the device presents itself as a bog-standard usb drive, with all the same identification strings, etc., and the hidden volume is completely inaccessible until triggered (e.g. like swapping on sd card for another), it seems like such a scanner would have to rely on things like precise timing and performance characteristics vs what the drive presents as, and there are a lot of legitimate USB drives out there to characterize.
Edit: and if that's the case, maybe pick a lower-performance drive to mimic (and use its case). Then have some kind of characterization step to add custom delays to match its timing and performance characteristics.
> (2) Your actual security comes down to the strength of the encrypted volume, and this is 20-year-old encryption. He can't use a memory-hard KDF because of his BOM, which, like, fair enough, but that doesn't change the fact that this KDF is probably ~50x faster than standard bcrypt hardness and on realistic human passwords is probably crackable in minutes-to-hours on a dedicated rig.
I agree. What's the point of doing on-device encryption? Seems like this device should only do the volume-swapping bit. Once it "it unmounts [the unhidden section] and remounts the second hidden section, you should have to decrypt that hidden section with soemthing like VeraCrypt.
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#17If 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…
> Concealing an encrypted volume jacks suspicion way up; whatever pickle you were going to be in if you just kept an encrypted DMG on your desktop, you're trebly in now.
Time to bust out the old "Can't tell if this MP3 is a steganographically important encrypted file or just a Nurse With Wound EP" trick then.
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#18If 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.
That would just be dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/path/to/device
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#19Earlier 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.
> There are people sitting in jail because they couldn't decrypt the "random noise" on their computers.
No, there isn't.
Re: My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
#20Earlier 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.
Fair warning; any links to specific cases (not the law itself)?