[Cryptography] Disk encryption

[Henry Baker]

I don't know much about the details of various disk encryption schemes,
but I have had a lot of experience with HDD's and SSD's.

In my experience, SSD's are now as reliable, if not more reliable, than
HDD's, and I've replaced most of my HDD's by SSD's.

The good news is that crypto itself has provided everyone with outstandingly
good error-detection codes (e.g., crypto hashes), so you're now much more
likely to know about storage errors today than even 10 years ago.

The part about not trusting SSD's has to do with the inability to guarantee
that deleted stuff is actually deleted, and cannot be magically recovered.

That is where encryption can help enormously.

*Always* encrypt SSD's, so that *erasure* really does work; just throw
away the private encryption key and the SSD will then contain useless
random bits.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>
Sent: Mar 28, 2023 10:40 AM
To: Cryptography List <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
Subject: [Cryptography] Disk encryption

I've never used disk encryption before, so I have some concerns.

My understanding is that each encrypted block depends upon the previous
block (if not the entire chain), so what happens should an intermediate
block become corrupted?

I ask because I am now using an SSD drive (which I don't really trust),
but I was brought up on spinning rust for decades (no encryption).

Thanks.

-- Dave
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