I can’t help wondering what is up with all those people fighting in comments about encryption. You make the point time and again that having encrypted media is somehow suspicious. I see where you are coming from.
- There are cases where people have gotten in trouble for using TOR/Signal, because it was presented to the court that “this is what criminals use”.
- There are those Wall Street companies that got in trouble for using encrypted messengers with trading partners.
We know about these, because it makes headlines when it happens.
Yet, there are people here, in any similar discussion, not just this one, that keep telling us that encryption is useless because authorities can more easily break your bones than brute force your private key, and you are going to be in trouble just for having encrypted media.
Is that so? Remember the fuss when federal regulators wanted Apple to install backdoors to encrypted i-Phones? Why so? No no, bear with me, if you people are correct, then every person with an encrypted i-Phone should be in a watchlist? What about all these Linux laptops all with LUKS on the main hard drive, flying around?
How come we don’t hear about those people being prosecuted and brutalized every other day in all of these alternative media we are following?
Regarding encryption, I have a right to my fucking privacy and if you want to know what is in my hard drive, then you are the weird one. Now let’s discuss criminal prosecution. If the authorities have something on you and they need whatever is in your encrypted drive to convict you, then they do not have anything on you unless they break the encryption. The more people practicing encryption the less fruitful their efforts will be. Your argument amounts to little more than the very authorities slogan “if you don’t have something to hide”. More people using encryption should make it sink that not only people with something to hide will use encryption, and indeed, all these everyday, non-criminal people are already using Encryption in i-Phones and Linux without having their bones broken.
Yet you keep repeating this rhetoric, which seems to have no other purpose than deter people from using encryption.
Now let’s discuss brutality. If you live in a police state that can kidnap you and rough you up to forgo your protected right to privacy, then you don’t have a problem with encryption, but a huge political problem. In that case encryption won’t liberate you, but at the same time you have much bigger problems, and an entirely different threat model.
So the only thing you people could, in good faith, add to the discussion is “If you live in a police state, don’t rely solely on encryption, and update your threat model”. The other things you keep going on and on about are essentially a rebranded “if you don’t have something to hide” and they only seem designed to discourage people from adopting encryption altogether, and the fact you don’t let go can only mean one fucking thing.
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
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.