Merely Cloaking Data May Be Incriminating? 418
n0g writes "In a recent submission to Bugtraq, Larry Gill of Guidance Software refutes some bug reports for the forensic analysis product EnCase Forensic Edition. The refutation is interesting, but one comment raises an important privacy issue. When talking about users creating loops in NTFS directories to hide data, Gill says, 'The purposeful hiding of data by the subject of an investigation is in itself important evidence and there are many scenarios where intentional data cloaking provides incriminating evidence, even if the perpetrator is successful in cloaking the data itself.' That begs the question: if one cloaks data by encrypting it, exactly what incriminating evidence does that provide? And how important is that evidence compared to the absence of anything else found that was incriminating? Are we no longer allowed to have any secrets, even on our own systems?"
Other types of cloaking... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Other types of cloaking... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, The linked article is on local vulnerabilities in two common forensic software packages and doesn't even mention data "cloaking" techniques. If anything is offtopic here, it's the article or the headline.
Guilty until proven innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, technically speaking all data is "encrypted", it's the strength of the encryption that varies. Are we to assume that if forensics can't understand it then it is automatically incriminating? - That's nothing short of "guilty until proven innocent", under that policy the suspect can be locked away until he gives the investigators the non-existant key to unscramble the random sequence of bits found in the free sectors of his HDD.
"Also, The linked article...."
As is the custom on
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Now you can get pretty fuzzy in talking about whether or not strange filesystems constitute enough of a secret for them to be called encryption, however encodings such as ASCII, Unicode, Huffman codes, etc. are not encryption by either the popular or the cryptographic definitions.
Re:Guilty until proven innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
Really good point. Any compression system might be viewed as encryption if you don't know how to decompress it.
I actually had to throw together an encryption system today to store some archival material online. I wrote a one time pad in python where my pad was just a jpeg of a mountain I had lying around. I contend that my ciphertext is art, a picture of a mountain combined with some literature. Who's to say it isn't?
When it gets to he point where you can blame other people for your inability to understand what they are saying when they weren't speaking to you, the deaf and mentally disabled will rule the world.
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Re:Guilty until proven innocent (Score:5, Informative)
Pleading the fifth in front of a jury when you're the defendant is tantamount to an admission of guilt. But there was an encryption/steganography system called Rubberhose ( http://iq.org/~proff/rubberhose.org/ [iq.org] ) that allowed you to create an arbitrary number of encrypted volumes in one disk segment, where each volume took up a random sequence of blocks. You could have four or five encrypted volumes, one of which contained the incriminating material and the rest of which contained plausibly embarrassing and private material. Then you can comply; nobody can prove that you haven't decrypted everything, since the entire disk segment is filled with random-seeming data.
TrueCrypt does almost as well as Rubberhose, and it's maintained. It allows you to create nested encrypted volumes, but defaults to two volumes deep, and I'm not sure whether it supports any more than that.
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Re:Other types of cloaking... (Score:5, Funny)
Shadow account (Score:2)
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Easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
[ standard truecrypt [ deacoy porn ] [ hidden truecrypt [ deacoy gay porn ] [ doubly-hidden true crypt [ secret spy stuff muahahahaha ] ] ] ]
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Funny)
Man, if that's not true, I think many slashdotters will have to rethink how they hide their porn from their wives... Ok, from their mothers.
Can't prove hidden partition doesn't/does exist (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of a hidden partition is that you can't prove it either way, unless you actually unlock it with the key. So, without the key, I could say, "Yes, there's a hidden partition within this conventional TrueCrypt partition, but I'm not giving you the key!" or I could say, "No, there's no hidden partition," and you wouldn't be able to tell either way.
So, then, you *could* presume that there is a hidden partition --but then that would be on the same order as just presuming that I have something to hide just because I'm using TrueCrypt in the first place. If I don't actually have a hidden partition, and you go looking for one, you're going to spend a pretty long time looking. There's nothing more frustrating than looking for something to prove that it doesn't exist (bug-checking programming sessions, anyone?).
As a matter of course, I do set up TrueCrypt volumes at standard sizes that happen to be much bigger than I need --my usual is 680MB so I can burn the whole thing to a CD. I think all my financial files add up to about 100MB within the 680MB TrueCrypt volume. If you want to go looking in the remaining 580MB for some incriminating evidence --hey, knock yourself out.
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Why even ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you even have to ask? As private citizens we arent allowed to hide anything from the government. Its labeled as obstruction of justice and we get tossed in the can if we dont cough up the keys. Even if we have nothing to hide.
Re:Why even ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd just like to point out, that if creating loops in NTFS is incriminating, does having an encrypted file system mean we have something to hide? Or, for that matter, wouldn't DRM be an obstruction, since it prevents access to content? Oh, right, DRM isn't bad, because it has large, multi-national corporations giving large campaign contributions-- err, I mean, supporting it.
Hooray for capitalism!
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Re:Why even ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why even ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a definite need for encryption, and more than just the tired (and flawed) logic of "hiding from forensics", or "hiding illegal stuff" that a lot of people state.
For most companies, physical theft of equipment or media is a valid concern. For example, if someone steals a backup tape that is part of an encrypted backup set (or storage pool, depending on the terminology of the backup system), the company owning the tape can hire some private investigators to quietly hunt down the tape. Without encryption, it can mean serious losses (or prison time)if the info on the tape was any way sensitive, and SOX, HIPAA, or other corporate regulations get violated.
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why allow what would be "just" a hardware theft with use of encryption turn into a hardware, data, and possibly identity theft?
There's more sense to this than many people might realize. One of my software products tracks personal student information. Because of the potentially sensitive nature of student information, the product uses a file format that's been encrypted with libmcrypt, providing strong encryption. The product is also password-protected, so you can't use it without a program-level login and password as well as appropriate operating-system level permissions.
Thus, if one of the users of the system loses their laptop o
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Re:Why even ask? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why even ask? (Score:5, Funny)
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This is why the next presidential election will probably decide the fate of our country. We can continue down the current path of big government (Clinton, Obama, Guiliani, Romney, McCain) or we can elect the ONLY candidate who wants to restore privacy.
Yes, restore privacy and
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And upon what do you base this assertion? The American people have shown time and time again that they'll accept any injustice, no matter how grave, so long as their bread and circuses aren't endangered.
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But, more importantly, Paul has a long history of aligning himself with neo-fascist, white supremacist and Christian Reconstructionist groups. This man wants a fundamentalist, Taliban-esque theocracy run by white men. None for me, thanks.
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As private citizens we arent allowed to hide anything from the government.
So I'm guessing innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to a person's data, just a person. So if any information(data) hidden from government view in incriminating, then does that give "probable cause" to anything not already in plain sight? This would seem to be the death blow to already suffering 4th Amendment- "The right of the people t
It's called a "warrant". (Score:5, Interesting)
The cops go to a judge and get a warrant based upon whatever evidence they have that a law was broken.
They'd have to have access to it already to see that it was encrypted. And that access should require a warrant.
Again, see the word "warrants" there?
Encrypt EVERYTHING to protect yourself from regular criminals.
But if you are accused of a crime, you have to decide whether the encrypted data will help your case or harm it. And if it will harm your case, will it do more or less harm than refusing to decrypt it?
But there has to be a warrant. Focus your complaints on situations where there aren't any warrants.
Re:It's called a "warrant". (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah. Except when the authorities just break down your door, or tap your|everyone's phone, or search your vehicle, or take your property, or freeze your assets, just because that's what they've decided they want to do. Warrant, my ass. Wake up.
Yes, it should. But it doesn't. So... now what?
No. There doesn't. There doesn't have to be a trial, either. Or access to representation. Or even a phone call. You can be tortured. Welcome to the USA. Papers, please.
Re:Why even ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, there you have it. Police are allowed to look at anything in plain sight but need probable cause to look at anything else. Of course, that means nothing when simply having something not in plain sight is considered probable cause.
Re:So if I... (Score:2)
Once you have a warrant. (Score:2)
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However, in civil procedings the Discovery Process may require you (under pain of contempt) to produce all requested documents. Perhaps including keys if it can be proven you still retain them. Lawyers can argue whether a plaintiff has a right to the keys indepe
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Encrypt random noise. Lose the keys. (Score:5, Funny)
I encourage everyone to generate files containing nothing but random noise, encrypt those files, and throw away the key. If everyone does this then they can't tell what is a real encrypted file and what isn't. For good measure email some of these random files back and forth with suspicious subject lines.
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Begs the question (Score:5, Informative)
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The answer to the question he begs is, hiding has become incriminating by definition.
Zonk should know better by now. (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, when you start multiplying the meanings that a word or phrase can have, you start reducing its usefulness. When it cannot make a specific idea clear, in contexts where the meaning may be ambiguous one now has to use even more words to get their idea across.
Anyway, this specific mistake has been pointed out many times on slashdot. Zonk really should know better by now.
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Yes it is, but that doesn't stop it from having other definitions.
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This is true, merely being a logical fallacy does not stop the phrase "begging the question" from having other definitions. Not having any other definitions, however, does stop it from having other definitions. Evolving a language over time does not mean "make shit mean whatever you feel like, and pray everyone can figure out what the hell you actually meant."
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That's a tautology, not begging the question. Even the actual point of the article, that encryption must mean that you are hiding incriminating evidence, is wrong, but does not beg the question.
Welcome to 1984 (Score:2)
But Comrade... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ours..? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are they still our systems these days? I could've sworn the EULA said it was just a license I bought...
Good luck... (Score:5, Insightful)
Absent any other damning evidence (other concrete evidence found at the defendant's house, financial records at banks and such pointing straight to the suspect, witness testimony, etc), the prosecutor is pretty much fscked if he thinks a jury (dumb as they may be) is going to buy any counter-argument to even a halfway cogent alibi. Everyone knows that Windows is insecure. Everyone knows someone who got a virus. Everyone knows that identity theft is a Bad Thing(tm).
Sorry, but I somehow don't see how a whole case could hinge on just one bit of evidence: "well, he has an encrypted filesystem, and he keeps invoking the 4th/5th amendments(?) in order to not unlock it, so you must convict..."
Then there's the whole "evidence of absence is not absence of evidence" bit.
Not much left to be useful after all that...
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How do you know they wouldn't try that even without encryption being involved?
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Unless of course you're declared an Enemy Combatant, in which case, hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to Gitmo you go!
The police mindset (Score:5, Insightful)
And the police expect total control of any given situation. Whenever one does not cooperate with the police, the police no longer is in total control and will take whatever measures are necessary to regain total control.
Adding those two points simply will make that anyone who hides stuff from the police is automatically an ennemy that has to be controlled at once.
As a matter of fact, one cannot never win against the police. In a courtroom, yes, maybe, but not against the police.
So the obvious solution is that everyone should perform maximum obfuscation/encrypting of data, the idea being that one cannot jail a whole country.
How did this get to +5? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bitter about something, are we?
Except their partner on the beat. And Dispatch. And the Chief. And...
I don't think they do, realistically. They might want that, but doesn't everyone? I know I'd love to have total control of any given situation.
But realistically, any cop who has been around awhile should have seen the FBI take over an investigation, or a perp slip away because someone was stupid en
Re:The police mindset (Score:4, Insightful)
One has also to keep in mind that policemen are not policemen because they all have PhD's in Quantum Physics and refused tenure-track faculty positions at top universities to go and "serve and protect". To put it more bluntly, many of them are not very bright. And when people with guns who are not very bright lose control, it's not pretty (regardless on which side of the law they are). The trick is then not to only encrypt data but to encrypt it hide it altogether -- yes, steganography. Want to hide your data, then really "hide" it, don't just put it in super secure "safe" but leave the safe right in the middle of the living room. The not-so-bright people with guns have many ways of "persuasion" where they will make you give them the key eventually.
What ifI just don't tell them about it? (Score:2)
Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the difference between this scenario and one where someone merely claims to be unable to decrypt the data is irrelevant.
I thought that we were innocent until proven guilty in this country, not vice versa.
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(Yes, I know I should have previewed it, but I only preview when using html)
Another take.. (Score:2)
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5th Amendment (Score:2)
You can't use someone taking the 5th as "incriminating evidence".
They can't make you testify to your password, if revealing your password incriminates you.
IANAL.
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Also, how can they prove you didn't "forget" it, ala Ollie North?
-nB
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http://www.trussel.com/hf/fifth.htm/ [trussel.com]
Why the Fifth Amendment by Howard Fast
What baloney (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh (Score:2, Insightful)
And that, 'Are we no longer allowed to have any secrets, even on our own systems?' line is pretty sensationalist. Thats like declaring that it will soon be illegal to own a safe because a court issued a search warrant of someone's house.
legal issue but technical commentator (Score:3, Insightful)
The relevance, admissibility, or incriminating character of the mere fact that a defendant hid something (i.e., as separate from the hidden content) is a legal question. In general, the absence of evidence is irrelevant with a few exceptions (obviously it's highly relevant to charges of destroying evidence!). The most important one is that of an absence of regularly kept business records. So, if a business regularly kept records of, say, who entered a building, and an employee were suspected of stealing something from the business, and the records for that night were missing, then perhaps that could be used as evidence against the employee on the theory that the employee had erased the record to cover his or her tracks. The same would be true if the record, rather than being deleted, had been encrypted when the others were unencrypted or encrypted in a different way/with a different key.
This is a very glossed over view of a complicated topic, but on the narrow question of the mere fact of the use of encryption, I would tend to say that would generally not be incriminating. Certainly the prosecution cannot simply point to your TrueCrypt or FileVault encrypted drive and say "look! everything on that computer is encrypted, therefore we can't know what it is, therefore it could be evidence of wrongdoing." That is tremendously weak circumstantial evidence and falls far, far below the reasonable doubt standard.
Note: I am not a lawyer and this is a layman's opinion, not legal advice.
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Who would want to be in the hands of THOSE people?!
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Or made up of well-meaning people out to 'do some good' who will probably convict because a prosecutor tells them to, particularly if he has a police officer to testify - the nasty criminal types belong in jail.
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Encrypt everything, and provide for deniability (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything you *do* want hidden, needs to be done in such a way that there's nothing that indicates that there *is* anything hidden, ala Truecrypt's multiple volumes. "I don't need to *hide* anything, so I'm not using that feature, it's just a good encryption tool"
Deniability is what matters (Score:5, Informative)
What you need is deniability, as in a steganographic filesystem [wikipedia.org]. No one can ever prove that there is even anything there -- "Oh, I was just playing with it, I can reformat it if you want." Even better, embed data steganographically in standard data formats, like images.
It would be interesting to interpret the protection against self-incrimination [wikipedia.org] to include data storage, i.e. your hard disk is an extension of your consciousness. Of course, this does not accord with the original aim of this right, which was to prevent false testimony/confessions induced by torture -- your hard disk exists apart from your "will."
Keeping a secret (Score:2)
Encrypt everything (Score:4, Insightful)
Encrypt everything, hide everything. Then they can't point to this-or-that encrypted file and say that that's the one that must contain the incriminating evidence. The fact that most people do indeed only hide stuff when they "know they're doing something wrong" only helps the bastards build their cases.
Recent trend in computer virii might help... (Score:2)
You could claim it wasn't your doing, you were a victim of Ransomware [slashdot.org]...
Murder (Score:3, Informative)
Similarly, if the cops accuse you of murder and you don't tell them where the bodies are, that proves that you are guilty.
What about a physical safe? (Score:2)
The right way for law enforcement to treat encrypted data on a disk is to treat it the same as a combination safe (with the password being like the combination to the safe)
Merely Cloaking Data May Be Incriminating? (Score:2)
No it doesn't. See "Begs the question" [wikipedia.org].
In the absence of any other evidence, none.
If there is no other evidence then the fact of encryption is not evidence.
But then, if there is no other evidence it is not likely (not impossible, but unlikely) that they would be looking at your
Makes a good case for hidden volumes (Score:2)
With TrueCrypt you can create a hidden volume within an encrypted volume with separate passwords. If pressured you give up the password for the outer volume where you put something mildly important so they...whoever they is in that scenario...think they got something.
What's really a shame is that anyone in the US has to even think in those terms. Sad world we have made.
'cause there is never a legit reason to encrypt (Score:2)
I can't see any judge believing that it's a bad idea to apply security to personal financial data.
The Matter of Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no promise of Privacy in the Constitution, and even if there ever had been, we'd have ground that right down to a bloody stump by now with the growing power of technology on one side and the exploding power of government and big business on the other. It's hard to even say that in a world with accelerating technology and the ability to grow weapons of mass destruction in your own garage or basement, that there isn't some justifiable need for privacy to give way to greater security.
That said, Govenment and big Business have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that they cannot be trusted to wield the power of absoute intrusion with intelligence, dignity, or even a modicum of good taste. Microsoft is planning to turn your personal computer into their data tap in your home, a private spy on your desk... and what about our government, just today, four men falsely accused of murder in Boston by the FBI (two of whom died in prison and two others who spent 30 year behind bars), just got record making settlements of $102,000,000.00 for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. Are these really the folks you wants to be watching every atom of your transparent life day in and day out? God help you if it becomes in their political or financial interest to have you made into "Soylent" (pick a color.)
So if we're going to live in a transparent society, where every person is;
- Videod from the time they leave their front door to the time the get back in the evening,
- Having every network packet they send or receive deep scanned for content, ownership, recipients, and legality,
- Running a computer with hardware and software providing virtually total exposure to data collecting agent both benign and malignant,
- And ultimately where every appliance, every room, every space will be filled with intelligent sensors recording every action, preference,
habit, activity, and affiliation that any of us might have,
then we are clearly far overdue for the creation of a new Bill of Rights. We must begin to think about the implications of our technology, and how the clear and unbridled abuse of that power by a loathsome few endangers all of us. If the world is to become transparent, then we must be assured that the eyes that see us, are fair, impartial, and dedicated to the sanctity of our humanity, and our dignity. In short those eyes cannot be human. They can be programmed by humans (who are themselves seen transparently by all), so that the tools that insure our safety, our comfort, ease, and efficiency, aren't used against us by greedy, power hungry, or despotic men. The temptation for misuse is simply too great, we must relenquish the process of watching people to ever smarter machines who have been programmed to act in our best interest. We need to make the breaking of these laws or personal protections prunishable by the most draconian measures. We need to watch the watcher and perhaps even watch those. We need to give people the blessings of infinite information without robbing them of every last shred of their humanity.In the end, this may indeed be the greatest challenge of the twenty first century
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See in most countries, you have the intrinsic right to EVERYTHING, and laws and constitutions set limits on those rights. Laws do not GRANT permission to citizens, they take permissions away. Laws ONLY grant specific permissions and rights to public servants and the government.
If there's no mention of privacy, YOU HAVE IT BY DEFAULT. At least that's the way it should be. And that's
Re:The Matter of Privacy (Score:4, Informative)
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There is no promise of Privacy in the Constitution
Incorrect. There is no explicit promise of privacy.
However, if you take the ninth amendment, and salt with a liberal (pun intended) helping of Supreme Court rulings, starting with Griswold v. Connecticut [wikipedia.org] in 1965, you'll find that it is pretty much established law forty-two years later. It is a 9th amendment unenumerated right, but supposedly also supported by the "Due Process" section of the 14th amendment. I don't really understand how Justice Harlan's "substantive due process" rationale actually works, b
You Don't Even Have to Actually Cloak Any Data... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, according to the morons on that court, even if you haven't actually encrypted any data, the fact that you had the tools to encrypt data was enough to judge criminal intent, sort of like possession of burglary tools. The problem, of course, is that encryption software has legitimate uses.
I wonder if any of those judges had Microsoft Office on their computers - if they did then they possessed encryption software and could be viewed as having criminal intent.
Well it don't matter to 'important people'... (Score:3, Insightful)
Truly though, just because you encrypt something has no basic legal grounds of incrimination, it is just like locking up your house. However just as a subpoena could be issued to force you to open your house to legal officials, a subpoena could also force you to un-encrypt the volume.
Beyond that, they are really grasping at straws or are trying to see the world via the horrors the Bush administration has done to civil protections and liberties.
Are we allowed? (Score:3, Insightful)
It works like this... (Score:5, Funny)
The government, being a public institution, has to keep everything it does private. That's why you are not allowed to see their secret files.
But a citizen, being a private individual, has to keep everything they do public. That's why the government must be able to see your secret files.
Got it?
Copyright all your data now. (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if he realizes that if a person has data to which he holds copyright on his hard disks, and then hides it, Gill's recovery software is then in violation of the DMCA anti-circumvention clause? His software is DMCA Grade-A illegal if anyone stores anything, no matter how trivial, that is his own copyright, is legal, and is deliberately hidden from this program.
Anyone with a legal background want to send this guy a "cease and desist" letter? }:^>
--
Toro
(c) 2007 *all rights reserved*
Re:4th Amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
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did you even read the entry...particularly about the MODERN USAGE?
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I'm not sure it was meant to imply that the act of cloaking is itself incriminating, but rather that knowing you cloaked your data might tell them where to look. But then, it really was not worded very clearly.
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There are too many laws.... (Score:2)
especially if the lawsyers themselves cannot know it all.
Face it, if they dont like you, they just arrest you, its easier, they dont have to think at all.
Enough innocent people have been burned by cops with psychopathic brains.
Just look at those cops in NY who say, "you cannot film me thats againts the law" but they know there is no law saying that, they
just like to scare peop
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The people you talked to were obviously not from Eastern Europe, some of the staunchest defenders of privacy/freedom I've met. Why? Because they've seen this show before. Much more vigilant than the regular Joe-six pack.
I'm sure some immigrants buy the "America is the free-est place ever!" argument but many do not.