a 19-year-old just got a 16-month jail sentence for his refusal to disclose the password that would have allowed investigators to see what was on his hard drive.
I suppose that, if the authorities could not read his stuff without the key, it may mean that the software he was using may have had no links weaker than the encryption itself -- and that is extraordinarily unusual - an encouraging sign of progress in the field, if of mixed value in the current case. Really serious data recovery tools can get data that's been erased and overwritten several times (secure deletion being quite unexpectedly difficult), so if it's ever been in your filesystem unencrypted, it's usually available to well-funded investigators without recourse to the key. I find it astonishing that they would actually need his key to get it. Rampant speculation: do you suppose he was using a solid-state drive instead of a magnetic-media hard disk? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831 Bear --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com
