Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

X/ax · 2008-09-08 21:23:29

Just out of curiousity, how much performance do I give in if I went to install truecrypt on the entire hdd? Considering they're telling me on their website they can have the hdd encrypted all the time I would assume they decrypt only what you need, and therefore it'll take a while (tracking the location on hdd of the file, decrypting it, and if necessary, decrypting all fragments doing those from step 1 again)
Sounds to me you'll get an increasing performance penalty using that.
Of course, that's only how I see it

Anyhow, cracking an encrypted hdd in 10 seconds, I don't believe that's possible. Not by a long shot. Except if the encryption is so damn crappy, it gives away everything. But even then, if the cracker (in this case the us government if I'm correct) doesn't know what is encrypting the hdd, it'll take >10 seconds in a whimp...

deltaecho · 2008-09-09 02:19:44

deltaecho wrote:

About how long do you think it would take to write over a 160Gb 5200rpm HDD with random characters using 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda' ?

Since it took ~12m11.448s to '/dev/random' 2kb of my hard drive, I'm guessing it would only take about 79.64232894508184 days to finish the job

I believe I'll be checking into @Profjim's wipe utility for this particular project.

Last edited by deltaecho (2008-09-09 02:27:00)

Gullible Jones · 2008-09-09 02:52:20

skottish wrote:

The US government has the keys to all commercially available encryption algorithms in the US (at least). That's why it's so easy.
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrim … faq.htm#1a
Oh yeah, and please don't start some idiotic political discussion over the above link. I posted it because it is a fact. We don't need any more spun-out, propaganda laden bullshit in the world.

No need for the attitude, man, the mods keep the lid on political crap.

Anyway - I assume you mean "backdoors" not "keys"? Does this apply to non-commercial encryption, or is it simply illegal (in the US or internationally) to distribute an encryption method with no backdoors in it?

Obi-Lan · 2008-09-09 15:11:43

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/0 … s-dis.html

B-Con · 2008-09-09 22:17:31

X/ax wrote:

Just out of curiousity, how much performance do I give in if I went to install truecrypt on the entire hdd? Considering they're telling me on their website they can have the hdd encrypted all the time I would assume they decrypt only what you need, and therefore it'll take a while (tracking the location on hdd of the file, decrypting it, and if necessary, decrypting all fragments doing those from step 1 again)
Sounds to me you'll get an increasing performance penalty using that.
Of course, that's only how I see it

The process is transparent, and works basically like any other filesystem you use. When you want to open a file, the mounting process is asked to go off and retrieve the data. TrueCrypt just encrypts and decrypts the data before/after. Performance hit is negligible. It includes a benchmark utility so you can test it, but you're really sacrificing nothing, especially for a data drive. Even if it were a drive you do a lot from its not a big deal. Don't let performance dissuade you in the least.

There are actually arguments that an encrypted TC drive runs faster, due to the way they organize and cache file system blocks. (In no way compromising security, though.)

X/ax · 2008-09-09 22:23:59

B-Con wrote:

X/ax wrote:
Just out of curiousity, how much performance do I give in if I went to install truecrypt on the entire hdd? Considering they're telling me on their website they can have the hdd encrypted all the time I would assume they decrypt only what you need, and therefore it'll take a while (tracking the location on hdd of the file, decrypting it, and if necessary, decrypting all fragments doing those from step 1 again)
Sounds to me you'll get an increasing performance penalty using that.
Of course, that's only how I see it
The process is transparent, and works basically like any other filesystem you use. When you want to open a file, the mounting process is asked to go off and retrieve the data. TrueCrypt just encrypts and decrypts the data before/after. Performance hit is negligible. It includes a benchmark utility so you can test it, but you're really sacrificing nothing, especially for a data drive. Even if it were a drive you do a lot from its not a big deal. Don't let performance dissuade you in the least.
There are actually arguments that an encrypted TC drive runs faster, due to the way they organize and cache file system blocks. (In no way compromising security, though.)

Interesting, this makes me more eagered to start using it. I'm going to start by testing it in simple directories, and I'm going to invest in a new drive (which I'll use as backup, so I can re-install my box)
Thnx a lot

Arch Linux

#26 2008-09-08 21:23:29

Re: Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

#27 2008-09-09 02:19:44

Re: Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

#28 2008-09-09 02:52:20

Re: Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

#29 2008-09-09 15:11:43

Re: Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

#30 2008-09-09 22:17:31

Re: Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

#31 2008-09-09 22:23:59

Re: Easy to crack an encrypted HDD - within 10 seconds ???

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