Norton encryption and privacy

17 Dec 2003

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This was posted to USENET several months ago. Diskreet is a PC-based
device driver which creates a virtual encrypted partition on 
a normal hard disk partition. I don't know if they use the same 
algorithms in Norton Encrypt or not.

Snooping in other people's files still sucks.

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From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,comp.security.misc
Subject: Norton's [In]Diskreet: An update
Followup-To: sci.crypt
Date: 13 Jul 1994 17:21:57 GMT
Organization: University of Auckland
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Sender: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Message-ID: <3017rl$8j4@ccu2.auckland.ac.nz>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs13.cs.aukuni.ac.nz
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Last November I picked apart part of the Diskreet encryption program and posted
what I found to this group.  By some miracle I had a bit of spare time this
afternoon, so I've had another quick look at it.  The result is some more
information on the proprietary encryption algorithm and the file format it
uses.  First, a recap of what I presented last time:

The key setup process is very badly done.  The front-end gets a password in the
range of 6..40 characters, and converts it to all-uppercase.  Then it packs it
into a struct along with a collection of other information and passes it to the
DES library used by Diskreet.  The first thing this does is take the password
and reduce it to 64 bits by cyclically xor-ing the full-length password into an
8-byte buffer initially set to all zeroes, ie:

    for( index = 0; password[ index ]; index++ )
        buffer[ index % 8 ] = password[ index ];

It then performs what looks like a standard DES key schedule with the 64-bit
output from this operation.  This creates 128 bytes of subkeys for encryption
and 128 bytes of subkeys for decryption.  These are either used for the
proprietary encryption method or for DES encryption.  Here's a rundown of the
proprietary method:

All operations are performed on 16-bit words.  byteSwap() performs an
endianness-reversal on a word.  Chaining is performed by xor-ing in the
previous ciphertext word.  The keyTable is the 256-byte array of DES subkeys,
treated as an array of words.

    data[ -1 ] = 0x1234;
    index = sectorNo % 128;
    index = keyTable[ index ] % 128;

    for( i = 0; i < SECTOR_SIZE / 2; i++ )
        {
        value = keyTable[ index++ ] + data[ i ];
        byteSwap( value );
        value ^= data[ i - 1 ];
        data[ i ] = value;
        index %= 128;
        }

As can be seen, a known-plaintext attack will recover the (expanded) encryption
key without too much trouble - it's just a repeated addition of a 128-word
array to the data, with the previous word xor'd in for chaining purposes.  The
xor and byteSwap are basically nop's and can be stripped off without any
problems, revealing the key stream used to encrypt the data.  Since encryption
is done by sectors, the same key data is used twice for each sectors.

How do we perform a known-plaintext attack?  It's quite simple actually, since
Diskreet itself provides us with about as much known plaintext as we need.  The
file format is:

    General header

    BYTE[ 16 ]          "ABCDEFGHENRIXYZ\0"
    char[ 13 ]          fileName
    LONG                fileDate
    BYTE                fileAttributes
    LONG                fileSize
    LONG                file data start
    BYTE[ 16 ]          0

    File data

    BYTE[ 32 ]          0

    Padding to make it a multiple of 512 bytes

Everything from the 16-byte magic value to the end of the file is encrypted in
blocks of 512 bytes.  The proprietary scheme will directly reveal its key
stream on the 16-byte check value, the 16 bytes of zeroes at the start, and the
32 bytes (minimum) of zeroes at the end of the data.  Interestingly enough, the
presence of the 16-byte known plaintext right at the start would tend to
confirm the rumours that that's one of the criteria for having an encryption
program approved by the NSA.  The plaintext also gives us the name of one of
the programmers involved.

In my previous posting I said:

  The encryption itself uses DES in CBC mode with a fixed IV.  This means that,
  in combination with the tiny key space, it's possible to create a precomputed
  collection of plaintext/ciphertext pairs and "break" most encrypted files by
  reading the results out of a table.

The 16-byte known plaintext makes this attack a certainty.  In addition, if two
pieces of data are encrypted with the same key, one with the proprietary method
and one with DES, the DES key can be recovered from the proprietary-encrypted
data and used to decrypt the DES-encrypted data.  Again quoting from my
previous posting:

  In summary, there may be a correct DES implementation in there somewhere, but
  it doesn't help much.  [In]Diskreet will stop a casual browser, but won't
  give you any protection at all against any serious attack.

Peter.

Norton encryption and privacy

Greg Broiles