[Cialug] Bypassing disk encryption

Matthew Nuzum matthew.nuzum at canonical.com
Tue Mar 3 10:06:04 CST 2009


Hi, internally we're discussing whole or partial disk encryption and
it took an interesting turn. I thought you guys might like that last
link to a 5m video demonstrating how to recover a bitlocker key after
a computer was turned off.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter


>> If your GPG key were stored on an encrypted partition like this and
>> your laptop was stolen, would you revoke your key?
>
> This question comes up every now and then. I would revoke it, too,
> however, it would be "just because". If you do believe that
> cryptography is working, then you wouldn't really need to, and if you
> believe that crypto can be broken, then you don't need to bother with
> using gpg in the first place.
>
> Of course there's still the question of the strength of each system.
> I didn't do an extensive research about the mean time of breaking a
> 256 bit AES or a 2048 bit DH/RSA key, but they shouldn't be vastly
> different (breaking DH/RSA takes magnitudes less than O(2^n)). But at
> some point such considerations become irrelevant anyway, since a lot
> of crypto attacks are done on errors on the implementation (timing,
> memory use, power usage, etc.)
>
> Oh, and then of course there's always http://xkcd.com/538/ :)

.. and

   http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/

*sigh*

Best regards


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