MacOS X (Panther) FileVault

[Tim May]

On Nov 12, 2003, at 5:40 PM, Ralf-P. Weinmann wrote:

> Panther's FileVault has already come up in a previous discussion, but 
> questions
> which I thought were pretty obvious and which I had expected at least 
> SOMEONE
> on cypherpunks to pose haven't come up... Sigh.
>
> Are there any whitepapers available on the design of FileVault? Except 
> for
> impressive words from marketing droids (AES-128, industry-standard 
> cipher,
> <yawn>) I have seen absolutely zilch on the implementation yet: i.e. is
> encryption done on a per-file basis or is rather blockwise underneath 
> the
> filesystem layer (ala loop-aes under Linux)? AES-128, fair enough; but 
> what
> mode is used for encrypting the files/blocks? ECB? CBC? CTR?  CCM?
>
> Maybe Apple ported PHK's GBDE [1], MacOS X having FreeBSD 
> underpinnings and all
> that?
>
> What I'd like for Apple to do is step ahead and release the source 
> code of
> FileVault for per review...
>

Loosely related to this, I was at the Hackers Conference this past 
weekend. At my last attendance, two years ago, Mac Titanium Powerbooks 
were fairly abundant, but faced good competition from x86 laptops.

This time, whoah Nelly, hold the horses! There must have been 40 of 
them, from the small iBooks to the mid-sized Al- and older 
Ti-Powerbooks, to the mammoth 17-inch model. It was astounding to me, a 
long-term Mac user, to see the Mac laptops completely dominant. Looking 
into the audience, a sea of silvering Mac laptops with the distinctive 
white, illuminated Apple logo.

A big hit was "Etherpeg," from www.etherpeg.com, which intercepts 
packets over a WiFi network and reconstructs the packets into JPEG 
images (if they exist). Since most of the Macs in the audience were on 
a local WiFi/"AirPort" network, arranged ad hoc, the output was put up 
on the LCD projector during one of the main talks. Images of naked 
chicks, oh my!

ObCrypto: Some of the Linux advocates said they had switched to Macs 
partly because the small form factor x86 boxes shipped only with 
Palladium (or its equivalent...they were referring to IBM, so it's 
whatever IBM is now shipping on its ThinkPads as part of their "Digital 
Rights Management" b.s.). A few people had Debian Linux installed on 
their Mac Powerbooks, though they acknowledged that with OS X being 
built on BSD Unix, there was no actual need to have Linux.

Interestingly, there were virtually no desktops of any sort at the 
Conference. Partly this is logistical--people have to decide to 
transport their machines. But the reports that laptops are now 
accounting for 50% of Apple's sales are showing up in what I saw at the 
Conference.

I hope Apple realizes the marketing edge they are gaining in some 
circles and doesn't do what Sony and IBM are doing.

AMD would also do well to realize that DRM and Palladium/Longhorn is a 
major marketing clusterfuck.xt


--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David 
Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11