DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

[88GT]

Problem is with most of the modern day free and/or commercial encryption software if you give it a nice long password it is not physically possible using the computering power we have to decrypt the data. The possible # of combinations would take all the computers in the world working together several hundred lifetimes over. So the "geek route" is useful.





Or better yet use the "container within container" that TrueCypt has. You can have one container with your REAL data and put that inside a second container with data. So when the tech sees that the drive is encrypt and they do force you to give us the password they get the password for the "data container" and never realize that the REAL container with data is still in the hard drive INSIDE the 1st container! MMMUUUUAAAHHHHHH

Or be even more evil and encrypt your data inside .BMP image files.
With HIDE IN PICTURE and looking at the BMP file no one will ever know that it holds data!

My head hurts after reading that!

I guess I just don't have enough stuff worth hiding. Who cares about pics of cute little boys and house cleaning schedules?

 

[jedi]

It's insane the levels of encryption you can get for free today, and I really don't see how they can legally force you to unlock it. You say you forgot, and there's no way for them to prove you didn't. "Sorry sir, it's way too long for me to remember. I had it saved on my cell phone but I dropped it in a lake and had to get a new one. I was planning on reformatting this week."

Problem solved.

Hum.. I see some waterboarding in your future.

My head hurts after reading that!

I guess I just don't have enough stuff worth hiding. Who cares about pics of cute little boys and house cleaning schedules?

Well in your case you just need to say that you lost all your guns in a boating accident.

 

[sdman11890]

Hum.. I see some waterboarding in your future.

Haha if I'm doing something worthy of torture to reveal a password, I would hope I'd be good enough at it to not get caught!

 

[Leo]

A man once told me to always keep a .45 on your desk. If you hear the police breaking the door down, put a couple of shots through the hard drive. The geeks are pretty good at breaking into your software, but a disc drive shattered with a bullet never talks again.

 

[SmileDocHill]

My head hurts after reading that!

I guess I just don't have enough stuff worth hiding. Who cares about pics of cute little boys and house cleaning schedules?

Well, that kind of stuff on my computer would definately keep me from ever being elected to a political office to say the least.

 

[jedi]

A man once told me to always keep a .45 on your desk. If you hear the police breaking the door down, put a couple of shots through the hard drive. The geeks are pretty good at breaking into your software, but a disc drive shattered with a bullet never talks again.

Hate to break it to you but the technology is now available to recover (partial) information from a hard drive that has a few holes in it (ie the type made by bullets) Unless you "shred" the plates putting just one or two holes will **NOT** be enough to not recover the data.

 

[Destro]

Hate to break it to you but the technology is now available to recover (partial) information from a hard drive that has a few holes in it (ie the type made by bullets) Unless you "shred" the plates putting just one or two holes will **NOT** be enough to not recover the data.

there are also programs to erase your HD that make destruction of your HD unnecessary..

 

[NYFelon]

one word.

Degausser

 

[Leo]

See, the technolgy is moving faster than me, I learned something. I guess I sould not store any sensitive information on a computer.

 

[NYFelon]

really though, there are several means available to end users to render their data unrecoverable. Also, a good portion are freeware so anyone can obtain and use them. All modern hard drives have the secure erase protocol embedded in their integrated electronics. There's also software which will use the algorithms defined in the D0D 5220 standard of data security. Both of these means take time, and the amount of time required to complete the necessary secure wipes depends on the size of the drive being wiped. So, if time is of the essence, your best bet is to physically render the drive incapable of being read. You can do this by physical destruction of the drive, or by demagnetizing the platters with the aforementioned degausser. By passing the HDD through a powerful electromagnet, you will render the drive 100% useless.

If anyone is interested in reading up on secure data erasure protocols, here are a few .pdf links
DoD 5220
CMRR Secure Erase Protocol
White Paper on Forensically Unrecoverable Data

 

[ViperJock]

Its not that hard to break your password. Its easy to recover data that has been "purged." I have a friend who used to do it for a living. Advice: Don't keep your sensitive information on a computer people. Keep it on paper next to the shredder, if you have to keep it at all.

 

[jbombelli]

Its not that hard to break your password. Its easy to recover data that has been "purged." I have a friend who used to do it for a living. Advice: Don't keep your sensitive information on a computer people. Keep it on paper next to the shredder, if you have to keep it at all.

Passwords are only easy to break when they don't look something like this:

m625sOKUl2l:.,(25)=hi6VBip[{*$#}]


You basically have two options available to break a password: brute force, which would take more years than you or your friend will be alive to break something like that, or using what you know about me and figuring it out because I used something stupid like "bada$$drummerdude".

 

[NYFelon]

The ease of recovering "purged" data depends on your definition of purge. A simple delete and format is not unrecoverable. Forensic data recovery is a time and money intensive operation. It's not as simple as the common misconception would have you believe. Specifically 0/1/random overwrites render data almost entirely impossible to recover. The issue with such data destruction methods is that they are time intensive, and the time required increases with the size of the storage medium. The data remanence is almost entirely expunged by the variance of the frequency of the overwrite signal. The frequency variance from low to high penetrates even the inaccessible parts of the disk and will make the recovery of any meaningful data impossible. Even the most advanced techniques available are incapable of recovering data off of a multi-pass random rewrite of a hard disk at the sector level. But again, if that still makes you uncomfortable, you can always degauss or physically destroy the disk.

 

[.452browning]

A man once told me to always keep a .45 on your desk. If you hear the police breaking the door down, put a couple of shots through the hard drive. The geeks are pretty good at breaking into your software, but a disc drive shattered with a bullet never talks again.

i may go with a crowbar or baseball bat instead of a gun if police are knocking on my door. no need getting kansas law dogs panties in a bunch with gunshots ringing from inside.

 

[RockofStrength]

Pure speculation here, but couldn't you keep a sufficiently powerful magnet in your house and just throw it on your hard drive if/when the police/mafia/your parents come in to break down the door?

 

[NYFelon]

Indeed you could. Hence my reference to a degausser.

 

[88GT]

Well, that kind of stuff on my computer would definately keep me from ever being elected to a political office to say the least.

LOL, perhaps. I may have a freebie in that one.

 

[mrjarrell]

LOL, perhaps. I may have a freebie in that one.

Don't count on it.
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[Wwwildthing]

I use Truecrypt with a 25 digit password. You want what's in that container? Go get it. I don't remember the password. Sorry. It was really long, and I never wrote it down, because only idiots write down their passwords. Besides, according to CSI you probably have a guy in your lab that can get into it in 5 minutes.

So.... you admit that the drive was encrypted with a 25 digit password?

Seems to me it would be better if you just SHUT UP.

 

[jbombelli]

So.... you admit that the drive was encrypted with a 25 digit password?

Seems to me it would be better if you just SHUT UP.

Believe me.. if you spent the time it would take to crack it, even KNOWING it was 25 characters, it would still take you decades if not centuries.

Then, when you finally got in there, if any of us were still alive by that time, the payoff would not be what you were expecting.

Finally, who says it's not actually 21, or 24, or 35. Maybe I just picked 25 out of thin air. Give me SOME credit.