I wrote:
| Indeed, the classic question is I've just bought this new computer
| which claims to have full-disk encryption. Is there any practical
| way I can assure myself that there are (likely) no backdoors in/around
| the encryption?
|
| For open-source software encryption (be it swap-space, file-system,
| and/or full-disk), the answer is yes: I can assess the developers'
| reputations, I can read the source code, and/or I can take note of
| what other people say who've read the source code.
On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Brian Gladman asked:
But, unless you are doing it with a pencil and paper, your encryption is still
being done in hardware even if you write it yourself.
For example, why would you trust an Intel processor given that Intel is one of
the founding members of the TCG and is a major player in its activities?
It's instructive to the distinction between data in motion encryption
(for example, a network-encryption-box (NEB) and data at rest encryption
(for example, a cryptographic filesystem):
A network-encryption box:
computer#1 NEB#1 ((network)) NEB#2 computer#2
plaintextciphertext ciphertext plaintext
As described by Henry Spencer in
http://www.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca/linux-ipsec/html/1999/09/msg00240.html
it's perfectly practical for (say) the NSA to arrange for a backdoor
in each NEB which occasionally leaks the keystream into the network,
in a way that's very unlikely to be caught in testing, but would make
it easy for an eavesdropper on the network to recover the plaintext.
A cryptographic filesystem:
I could imagine the NSA having arranged to plant some sort of microcode
backdoor in the Pentium III processor in my laptop. (The hardest part
would probably be persuading all the Intel employees involved that it
wouldn't be a PR disaster for Intel if the news leaked out.) In the
context of my original message, the backdoor would have to recognize
the binary code sequence of the OpenBSD AES routines when invoked by
the encrypting-filesystem vnode layer, and somehow compromise the
security (maybe arrange to leak keystream bits into free disk sectors??).
That's a tricky technical job, but I could imagine it being done, and
if it's all in processor microcode, I could even imagine it having
stayed a secret.
But that's not good enough: What about Matt Blaze's Cryptographic File
System? What about all the people using the various Linux encrypting
file systems? The backdoor(s) need to cover them, too. And the MacOS
ones (if there's not a software backdoor there). And all the other
open-source-crypto systems. And the backdoors have to do this without
compromising interoperability -- I have CFS directory trees which I
created on an old Sparc that I now use on my laptop.
But I think the hardest part of all is that the backdoor has to still
still recognize the various crypto binary-code-sequences even when the
relevant software is recompiled with a newer compiler using a different
global optimizer, even though that newer compiler might not even have
existed when the backdoor was inserted.
It's this variety of different software encryption schemes -- and
compilers to turn them into binary code (which is what the NSA/Intel
backdoor ultimately has to key on) that, I think, makes it so much
harder for a hardware backdoor to work (i.e. to subvert software
encryption) in this context.
--
-- Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]
jth...@astro.indiana-zebra.edu
Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
-- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam
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