On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
Christian Robinson wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
Before I realized what had happened I thought I'd lost a file (no
big deal, I just went to my backup).
You don't look at the text after doing ":e"? I think it's obvious
that something went wrong, thus writing the text is unlikely to
happen.
I did look at it, which is why I thought I'd lost the data. I guess I
was unclear: It was only after I'd made the mistake of assuming the
file was no longer decryptable that I did something that destroyed the
data, then had to resort to my backup.
My point is that Vim has poor feedback on what's going on in the event
that a user does what I did, or something similar enough to get the
same results. That may be how it has to be, and I can live with it
now that I understand, but it did "bite" me once.
It really wasn't a huge deal to me because I do keep backups,
especially of anything I edit with Vim 7.3/b BETA.
0 string VimCrypt~ Vim encrypted file
>9 string 01 - "zip" cryptmethod
>9 string 02 - "blowfish" cryptmethod
I wonder what systems support that ">9" notation. I can at least
add this to the documentation.
The alternative is to do it this way:
0 string VimCrypt~01 Vim encrypted file - "zip" cryptmethod
0 string VimCrypt~02 Vim encrypted file - "blowfish" cryptmethod
0 string VimCrypt~ Vim encrypted file
I wonder how we verify that the encryption works properly. Is there
some user group that inspects encryption code perhaps?
I don't know. I sporadically read Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram, and
sometimes glance through some other security related groups, so I've
seen a lot of talk of the need for peer review of cryptography, both
in the abstract and of specific implementations, but I haven't
encountered mentions of a group explicitly organized for that purpose.
Despite "zip" to be "broken" I haven't hear of anyone being able to
crack a password.
[Long-ish reply follows...]
During a quick Google search this morning on the subject I did find a
couple of stories about it.
One was a case of law enforcement breaking the encryption on a
suspect's zip file, but I didn't bother to discover how it was broken,
so I admit it could just have been a "social engineering" attack.
Another was a blog claiming it was trivial to break the old zip
encryption method, although I didn't read more than the first two or
three paragraphs to see if he provided any references to tools that
would do so.
Of course, any tool that breaks the encryption of a zip file would
have to be at least minimally retooled to break Vim's zip based
encryption simply because the file formats aren't the same.
But my point is that if such a tool exists, Vim's zip based encryption
can be considered to be broken. This may not really be a big deal to
most people; it's like the fact that we have more difficult to defeat
locks on our front doors, yet use only simple, easy to defeat locks on
our bathroom doors. In many cases simply stopping the casual,
possibly accidental intrusion is all we care about. If you want true
security, you should be far more careful than to use Vim's encryption
at all--at least until the blowfish implementation is "proven".
For me, the blowfish implementation is adequate enough for most things
I don't want people prying into. For truly sensitive data I will
continue to use other encryption tools that I (possibly naively) trust
far more, such as GnuPG.
And before someone responds to point it out to me: Yes, I'm aware of
the drawback of GPG/PGP files being decrypted to disk and being edited
"in the clear" with Vim. If someone that determined manages to get
physical access to my hard drive, I have bigger problems.
- Christian
--
Christian J. Robinson <[email protected]> -- http://christianrobinson.name/
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