Software Helps Rights Groups Protect Sensitive Information

[Mark Armbrust]

At 16:08 2004-05-31 -0400, Ivan Krstic <ccikrs1 at cranbrook.edu> wrote:
>This reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask for a while. Has 
>there been any research done on encryption systems which encrypt two (or 
>n) plaintexts with n keys, producing a joint ciphertext with the 
>property that decrypting it with key k[n] only produces the nth plaintext?
>
>In the particular scenario that the article describes, activists need to 
>protect their information from people that probably have little respect 
>for the Geneva convention and would possibly find any evidence of 
>encrypted information as proof enough that there is illegal activity 
>going on. This, in turn, might lead to the police beating the key out of 
>them.
>
>Now, if a solution such as Apple's FileVault or PGP's PGPDrive offered 
>an "interleaved drive" system where one file stored multiple encrypted 
>disks, and which one is accessed depended on which key you provided, 
>perhaps things can be changed a bit. Password A unlocks a drive with 
>mild dissidence information to appear credible. Password B unlocks a 
>drive with the truly secret data. If captured, after some hours of a 
>(probably highly unpleasant) interrogation, the dissident gives password 
>A, interrogators try it, it works, they find nothing of tremendous use 
>and dissident walks.

BestCrypt (http://www.jetico.com/) claims to do this for N = 2:
  "BestCrypt v.7 also allows the creation of hidden containers -
  containers not evident to an intruder. You can simply create
  another (hidden) container inside already existing (shell)
  container. Data stored inside shell and hidden containers
  can be completely different, passwords for the containers
  are also different, and it is not possible to determine
  whether the shell container has a hidden container inside
  it, or not. Version 7 help documentation contains detailed
  information on the creation and management of hidden
  containers."

--Mark

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