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Coronafix

Mon Jun 28 2010, 12:37AM

Registered Member #160 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 02:07AM
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 938

Seems that computer privacy may not be so private soon. Does this mean we will
be using full disk encryption to protect our intellectual property?

IntraWinding

Mon Jun 28 2010, 10:27AM

Registered Member #2261 Joined: Mon Aug 03 2009, 01:19AM
Location: London, UK
Posts: 581

!amazed Can you give me a summary?

radiotech

Mon Jun 28 2010, 10:45AM

Registered Member #2463 Joined: Wed Nov 11 2009, 03:49AM
Location:
Posts: 1546

Coronafix wrote "Does this mean we will
be using full disk encryption to protect our intellectual property? "

A long time ago in a steel plant they were having a problem counting the number of sheets of thin metal that flipped over off the end of the polishing machine. Many counters were tried and failed, so the managers offered a prize for the worker who could make one work properly.

Came the day they were judged. The winner was a marvel of simplicity. It was a simple delicate vane switch that worked on the air puff created as the sheets landed.

One of the loser teams came over to congratulate the fellow. Why was it so heavy they asked? The designer said he included two bricks in the base, so that when the thing was hefted by the competition during the development phase, they would indeed think the box contained a lot of electronics, and scurried off to try and cover all the bases to guarantee a win.

Mike

Mon Jun 28 2010, 04:15PM

Registered Member #58 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:40AM
Location: Tri-Cities, Washington, US
Posts: 317

just another sign of world governments getting in bed with the music and movie industries. too bad that this time of thing doesn't prevent piracy but only fuels it. they should take a lesson from the failed drug war here in the U.S.

HV Enthusiast

Mon Jun 28 2010, 04:56PM

Registered Member #15 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068

Big deal. Sure, sounds good on paper, but this type of international "policing" or whatever you want to call it costs big bucks. Given the state of the present world economy, and how nicely each state communicates with each other as it is, i wouldn't lose any sleep about it.

Maybe it provides a bit more ease to prosecute some of the HUGE big fish in the waters doing counterfeiting, IP theft, on a massive scale, but for small fish individual, it doesn't really mean anything.

Nicko

Mon Jun 28 2010, 06:26PM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

Coronafix wrote ...

Seems that computer privacy may not be so private soon. Does this mean we will
be using full disk encryption to protect our intellectual property?

Just get a copy of TrueCrypt.

Terrific product. And free!

For those not in the know, look up "plausible deniability" ...

Cheers

Coronafix

Tue Jun 29 2010, 12:01AM

Registered Member #160 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 02:07AM
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 938

IntraWinding wrote ...

Can you give me a summary?

"The personal computer may soon be not-so-private, with the U.S. and some European nations working on laws allowing them access to search the content held on a person's hard drive.

President Obama's administration is keeping unusually tight-lipped on the details, which is raising concerns among computer users and liberty activists.

Almost everyone today owns a music player and a laptop. But what if the Government decided to allow itself to access these personal devices for no specific reason whatsoever?"

Thanks Nicko, I was wondering about encryption programs as there is a long list of them on wiki.

Nicko

Tue Jun 29 2010, 05:51AM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

Coronafix wrote ...

... I was wondering about encryption programs as there is a long list of them on wiki.

Do not be deceived into thinking that because TrueCrypt is an opensource project, its somehow not production quality - it's been around for a LONG time, is very stable, and its underlying methodology & encryption was designed by Bruce Schneier, who most certainly knows his stuff. It has a huge user base and the developers respond pretty much immediately to any theoretical vulnerability etc.

In a previous life I spent a while in the cryptology/cryptanalysis arena, and this is what I and most of my colleagues use. It does everything that the "commercial" offerings do, as fast and as well, and none of us have had a corruption/data loss. Only when insisted by a client etc. do we use products like BeCrypt etc.

Edit: Just noticed they are showing 14,692,435 downloads as of today...

Cheers

quicksilver

Tue Jun 29 2010, 03:12PM

Registered Member #1408 Joined: Fri Mar 21 2008, 03:49PM
Location: Oracle, AZ
Posts: 679

This is an interesting topic for me as I had some conversations with Phil Zimmerman (of PGP: the original...) prior to his going to court for "exporting a munition"; this, quite some many years ago.
Cryptology today has hit a roadblock due to rather secretive new "super computers" which are the reserve of "government / military only". In fact there are firms that actually do not advertise their serious computers and the majority of the "average" computing world has not even heard of them or their wares (no pun intended).
The new machines make "time intensive" decoding inconsequential. They also can process several algorithms at the same time. The introduction of something called a "logic block" is similar to a type of artificial intelligence that processes in an unknown manner, the way something may be encrypted.
Obviously, these machines are not common enough to even get a grip on their prowess & utility. {But they exist none the less.} Remember what filled a room several years ago sits on a desk today. What fills a room today; is mind boggling.

Nicko

Tue Jun 29 2010, 03:30PM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

quicksilver wrote ...

This is an interesting topic for me as I had some conversations with Phil Zimmerman (of PGP: the original...) prior to his going to court for "exporting a munition"; this, quite some many years ago.
Cryptology today has hit a roadblock due to rather secretive new "super computers" which are the reserve of "government / military only"....

Its an interesting topic all round. Its now illegal in Germany (and elsewhere) to sell computers that might be used for code breaking (e.g.

, as if that'll change anything...

There are dedicated keyspace engines based on huge (and even no-so-huge) arrays of stonking FPGAs which parallelise attacks - using pre-calculated metadata also helps greatly (cf. Rainbow Tables

etc.).

Then we come to the basic issue - most common algorithms rely on the difficulty of finding the prime factors of very big (maybe 200+ digit) numbers. It's generally assumed that this problem may well have been privately solved by the Israelis/British/USA intelligence services and its in no-one's interest to let it become public - not a conspiracy theory, just pretty likely...

i.e., it may be that all this focus on massive computing power is a bit of smoke-and-mirrors - it's all supposed to address a problem that for all most of us know, may well no longer exist. Don't forget that the algorithm popularly known as the Diffie-Hellman Key-Exchange was discovered two years earlier in 1974 at GCHQ in the UK by Malcolm Williamson

(and maybe by other agencies) - they just kept it quiet. And why not?

Lastly, it's easy to focus on the technical complexity of cracking cyphers - Bruce Schneier and others have pointed out that social engineering attacks are often more timely (quicker) and tend to be an order of magnitude cheaper, e.g. kidnap someone's child and threaten to do whatever unless you are given access - what Schneier refers to as "rubber-hose cryptanalysis". An example of this was the GBP 50M robbery just up the road from where I live, where fake police kidnapped the family of the manager of a cash clearing depot and could have got away with over GBP 100M, but they couldn't fit any more into their van... All the security in the world couldn't address that one easily...

Cheers

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