English 19-year-old jailed for refusal to disclose decryption key

silky michaelslists at gmail.com
Wed Oct 6 19:37:09 EDT 2010


On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 5:57 AM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
> a 19-year-old just got a 16-month jail sentence for his refusal to
> disclose the password that would have allowed investigators to see
> what was on his hard drive.
>
> I suppose that, if the authorities could not read his stuff
> without the key, it may mean that the software he was using may
> have had no links weaker than the encryption itself -- and that
> is extraordinarily unusual - an encouraging sign of progress in
> the field, if of mixed value in the current case.
>
> Really serious data recovery tools can get data that's been
> erased and overwritten several times (secure deletion being quite
> unexpectedly difficult), so if it's ever been in your filesystem
> unencrypted, it's usually available to well-funded investigators
> without recourse to the key.  I find it astonishing that they
> would actually need his key to get it.

Interesting.

It's interesting to think about the possibilities some sort of
homomorphic cryptosystem would offer here. I.e. it would be arguably
useful (from one point of view) if they were able to search the data
for specific items, and failing finding items of those types, *then*
the fallback is this sentence, otherwise it seems like a pretty
trivial way out for anyone wishing to hide bad activity.


> Rampant speculation: do you suppose he was using a solid-state
> drive instead of a magnetic-media hard disk?
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831
>
>                                Bear

-- 
silky

http://dnoondt.wordpress.com/

"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy
of being this signature."

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