This was sent to several individuals and five mailing lists. Is that necessary?
I've cut reply down to two lists.
Marc Horowitz wrote:
>
> For most attackers and most secrets, more traditional techniques like
> blackmail and torture are likely to be cheaper and easier than the
> attacks below. At some point, you need to decide that the technical
> solution is good enough, because it will never be perfect.
Perhaps, but why not just make it as good as we know how? The only
reasom I can see not to do that is if it is prohibitively expensive.
Neither using an adequate key size (128 bits) nor wiping files
(multiple overwrites, some random) is prohibitively expensive.
In any case, we should not leave obvious holes. 56-bit keys or
unwiped temporary files are obvious holes.
> Eugene Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> >> Wiping is not enough in some cases....
Right. See Gutmann's paper; there's a link elsewhere in the thread.
> >> Arnold G. Reinhold writes:
> >> > On the specific complaint that seems to have started this thread, the
> >> > lack of a wipe option in the file encryption, I would just like to
> >> > point out that wiping the original file when you encrypt it is
> >> > nowhere near enough. Many popular applications, such as MS Word,
> >> > create temp files all over the place. A better approach is to wipe
> >> > all disk free space regularly. This can be easily automated in the
> >> > MacOS using shareware utilities and Applescript.
Good idea.
