IMO, deniable something encryption is just not practical in real life. Authorites can make you life real hard, or just throw you straight into jail, just by suspecting you have encrypted materials.
The point is they don’t have to proof if a piece of random data is indeed an encrypted blob.
Imagine you passing border security and got selected for search. They found a piece of data on your device with high entropy without known headers in the wrong place. You can claim you know nothing about it, yet they can speculate the heck out of you. In more civil nations, you might got on to a watch list. In a more authoritive nations, they can just detain you.
They don’t have to prove you hiding something. The mere fact of you have that piece of high entroy data is a clue to them, and they have the power to make your life hard. Oh you said you deny them for a search? First congrats you still have a choice, and secondly that’s also a clue to them.
For more info, read cryptsetup FAQ section 5.2 paragraph 3, 5.18, and 5.21. It is written by Milan Brož who is way more experienced than me on this matter.
I think you overvalue the skillset of border security. This may seem trivial to you but it’s uncommon to hire people trained to this level of competence and put them at every point of entry. A decent cybersecurity investigator needs a big salary.
That would probably happen if you were already a suspect of something or a high profile person and they moved in resources for you. No way border security is randomly sweeping for headers and entropy, they basically just look at it with the explorer and clone it, possibly using some software to scan for known security vulnerabilities to access encrypted parts. That would be a court ordered search or a high profile crime investigation, or maybe a really really unlucky day where the expert was already there for another reason, but the rest i agree.
If your threat model makes you a high profile person, then smuggling data in hidden containers is definitely not the best solution. A non associated personal cloud server is best.
You cannot differentiate between random data or encrypted data, when it is done right. That is one of the reasons why you should initialize an encrypted drive with random data beforehand
The point is they don’t have to proof if a piece of random data is indeed an encrypted blob.
But they do need to suspect it.
If they find an encrypted blob, ask for the decryption key, they decrypt the data and analyse the decrypted data, then they may not suspect that a different decryption key will reveal a different set of data.
IMO, deniable
somethingencryption is just not practical in real life. Authorites can make you life real hard, or just throw you straight into jail, just by suspecting you have encrypted materials.That is the point. They cannot find it. Yes they can try to force it out of you but then they would need to know it is there.
When you get searched for drugs and they do not find any, what does lea do?
The point is they don’t have to proof if a piece of random data is indeed an encrypted blob.
Imagine you passing border security and got selected for search. They found a piece of data on your device with high entropy without known headers in the wrong place. You can claim you know nothing about it, yet they can speculate the heck out of you. In more civil nations, you might got on to a watch list. In a more authoritive nations, they can just detain you.
They don’t have to prove you hiding something. The mere fact of you have that piece of high entroy data is a clue to them, and they have the power to make your life hard. Oh you said you deny them for a search? First congrats you still have a choice, and secondly that’s also a clue to them.
For more info, read cryptsetup FAQ section 5.2 paragraph 3, 5.18, and 5.21. It is written by Milan Brož who is way more experienced than me on this matter.
I think you overvalue the skillset of border security. This may seem trivial to you but it’s uncommon to hire people trained to this level of competence and put them at every point of entry. A decent cybersecurity investigator needs a big salary.
That would probably happen if you were already a suspect of something or a high profile person and they moved in resources for you. No way border security is randomly sweeping for headers and entropy, they basically just look at it with the explorer and clone it, possibly using some software to scan for known security vulnerabilities to access encrypted parts. That would be a court ordered search or a high profile crime investigation, or maybe a really really unlucky day where the expert was already there for another reason, but the rest i agree.
If your threat model makes you a high profile person, then smuggling data in hidden containers is definitely not the best solution. A non associated personal cloud server is best.
The most relevant part is 5.18 and it only talks about partitions not files. A file can be way more easily hidden in a partition then a partition.
It is simply no hope aginst an automated scanner. No one search for files manually today.
You cannot differentiate between random data or encrypted data, when it is done right. That is one of the reasons why you should initialize an encrypted drive with random data beforehand
But they do need to suspect it.
If they find an encrypted blob, ask for the decryption key, they decrypt the data and analyse the decrypted data, then they may not suspect that a different decryption key will reveal a different set of data.