Secure Drive is now obsolete
Secure Drive, the disk encryption system written by me and improved by Edgar Swank, has been completely rewritten by two programmers in the Netherlands, Max Loewenthal and Arthur Helwig. I was not aware of this until I saw the program yesterday. They changed it to Secure Device. It still uses the IDEA algorithm, but you no longer have to create a partition! Secure Device uses a file as a phantom partition, like Stacker or inDiskreet. It has a .SYS driver of about 6K. There is a login program, or you can use another TSR which does a pop-up login prompt. There is also keyboard logout and time-delay logout. Another advantage of Secure Device is ease of backup. You just backup the container file onto your tape, and the data stays encrypted. Secure Device includes source code and is copylefted. FTP wuarchive.wustl.edu, /pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/cryptography/secdev11.arj. --- Mike
Can SecureDevice be used to mount from a network volume? This would be a very very useful feature, although I'd imagine a total headache to actually implement... The one thing I dislike about SecureDevice (even before using it) is that it can be zapped by a frustrated would-be-codeanalyst... Of course now that we can back it up to tape, it's not that big an issue. :-) Also, the old SecureDrive program had a protection feature in the TSR, but in any case, it wouldn't help if the TSR was killed off, or if our bad-guy booted from a floppy. He could still kill the drive... But that's not too huge an issue as anyone can zap your hard drive if they wanted to in any case... :-I
I just started using this program (secure device) yesterday. I love the concept, however there is something that bugs the hell out of me... I set it up for a 30-meg encrypted 'volume', and the file is indeed about 30 megs. However when I 'log in' to it, a dir shows only about ten megs of space. I tried creating an additional secure device volume, and this one was 25 megs on the outside and a bout 8 megs on the inside. From what I glean from Applied Cryptography, IDEA usualy produces cyphertext approximately the same size as the cleartext, right? so why the massive difference in available space? Happy Hunting, -Chris. ______________________________________________________________________________ Christian Douglas Odhner | "The NSA can have my secret key when they pry cdodhner@indirect.com | it from my cold, dead, hands... But they shall pgp 2.3 public key by finger | NEVER have the password it's encrypted with!" cypherpunks WOw dCD Traskcom Team Stupid Key fingerprint = 58 62 A2 84 FD 4F 56 38 82 69 6F 08 E4 F1 79 11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ On Sat, 30 Apr 1994, Mike Ingle wrote:
Secure Drive, the disk encryption system written by me and improved by Edgar Swank, has been completely rewritten by two programmers in the Netherlands, Max Loewenthal and Arthur Helwig. I was not aware of this until I saw the program yesterday.
They changed it to Secure Device. It still uses the IDEA algorithm, but you no longer have to create a partition! Secure Device uses a file as a phantom partition, like Stacker or inDiskreet. It has a .SYS driver of about 6K. There is a login program, or you can use another TSR which does a pop-up login prompt. There is also keyboard logout and time-delay logout.
Another advantage of Secure Device is ease of backup. You just backup the container file onto your tape, and the data stays encrypted. Secure Device includes source code and is copylefted.
FTP wuarchive.wustl.edu, /pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/cryptography/secdev11.arj.
--- Mike
However when I 'log in' to it, a dir shows only about ten megs of space. I tried creating an additional secure device volume, and this one was 25 megs on the outside and a bout 8 megs on the inside. ____________________________________________________________________________ Christian Douglas Odhner cdodhner@indirect.com
I think it's a bug and I've written Arthur Helwig about it.. I'll post the jist of his response when I get it. I had made a 50MB partition and got only 18MB out of it.. but a 1MB partition gave me a full MB. I assume it's another problem with MKVOLUME. The one released with 1.1 had a limit of 8MB.. maybe this release has some ratio limit problem.. BTW: Has anybody inspected the code for SecureDevice? I'm going to look at it right now but I'd easily miss weaknesses in the implementation of IDEA. TTFN P.S. are Tacky Tokens still being processed? I never got any response to my GIF FOR SALE post a while back. It's only 5 tt. so get two today. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- - DrZaphod #Don't Come Any Closer Or I'll Encrypt! - - [AC/DC] / [DnA][HP] #Xcitement thru Technology and Creativity - - [drzaphod@brewmeister.xstablu.com] [MindPolice Censored This Bit] - - 50 19 1C F3 5F 34 53 B7 B9 BB 7A 40 37 67 09 5B - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
participants (4)
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Christian D. Odhner -
Mike Ingle -
rarachel@prism.poly.edu -
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