Recovering data from encrypted disks, broken CD's

[Florian Weimer]

* Steven M. Bellovin:

> I wonder how accurate this is.  It's certainly true that some drives have
> vendor passwords to unlock them.  It's hard to see how they could break
> through (good) software encryption,

A lot of software tends to create temporary files in random places.
If you don't encrypt the whole disk (including swap space and the
suspend-to-disk area), plaintext might be written to the disk and can
be recovered even though the actual cryptography is sound.  This
assumes that transparent decryption is used--the situation is worse if
you need to create a temporary plaintext copy on disk before you can
actually process the data.

(Now I only need to figure out why sequential disk I/O takes such a
significant hit when using dm-crypt. *sigh*)

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