Well said on skepticism of news reports concerning crypto, comsec, infosec, natsec. Disinfo and deception are inherent in security and survival, and best, most reliable, most trusted are typical tools of misleading exploitation. Where a single means and method, such as crypto (or science), is encouraged for rock-solid assurance, at least one other means and methods should be employed which in no way depends upon the single means. Hoodwink wins by cheating. A single means is certain to be continously under attack, and its vulnerabilities concealed both by the attackers and by the promoters. Blind faith in a single means is as old as religion, art and royalty, perhaps as old as humans faced with unending threats from nature and mortality -- and most of all from each other's thieving and murderous practices. Duplicity and con-jobs were essential, along with bigger clubs and rocks, voodoo and faux-virgin sacrifices -- ISIS hardly different, except more modest and sane and much less wealthy, than Los Alamos, The Vatican, JP Morgan, Ashley Madison, Silicon Valley and the IC all fostering blind faith in their own advertising of rockefeller-st-peter-approved STD protection. Some HTTPS Everywheres lately have been advertising encryption and HTTPS as condoms to protect against Internet STD, aka privacy rape. Peddlers of these hygienics are surely donors to the of Church of Crypto whose priests do enjoy the pleasures of insider hoo-haa. At 02:25 AM 8/23/2015, you wrote:
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On 08/22/2015 06:07 PM, Tomas Overdrive Petru wrote:
This one has been puzzling me for several days. Since I have not yet been able to figure it out, I thought I would "bleg" for assistance from our encryption-savvy readership. According to the Sun Sentinel <http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-christopher-glenn-sentenced-2
0150731-story.html>,
a South Florida man was recently convicted of stealing military
secrets. I am less concerned with what he stole or why than with what the story says about how the evidence against him was identified and used. Here is the relevant part of the story:
Historically, the FBI has used keyloggers to defeat PGP Disc and Truecrypt - and also, I am sure, other encrypted file systems that don't have back door access as a standard feature.
Since rubber hose cryptanalysis and bugging computers are well known FBI methods, while world + dog have failed so far to make real progress on breaking the ciphers used in Truecrypt, I see no reason to suspect the latter occurred. None at all.
The word "Truecrypt" does not appear in this summary of expert testimony, which describes forensics conducted at the facilities the classified files were borrowed from:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/08/04/glenn_exhibit_1.pdf
So, the defendant was already in the bag before somebody managed to type the correct pass phrase and examine the contents of his stash. I found no indication of whether his guilty plea came before or after investigators had access to the encrypted data; it seems very likely that handing over the pass phrase was part of a plea deal.
Persuading people that a cryptographic tool does not work is a very effective attack against it. Should we blame ignorance or something else for the "Truecrypt is broken" take-away many casual readers will pick up from this story as written?
:o)
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