PGP Whole Disk Encryption: Now for OS X

Paul,

Do you really think it’s the NSA who cracked FileVault? :-)
I bet they did already, but they’d never publish details about it.

nsa.org is not NSA :)

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@David – Not true. See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

“A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can’t force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase… …has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors”

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Gotcha, I am cheap and stick with the Subscription License ;)

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Paul, I am interested as to why you do this yet use S3, various online services, google, bandwagon etc…. surely there is nothing on your lappy that couldn’t be found by dodgy people or the government online?

I hope you write a follow up soon as i have always been interested in PGP for email mainly but its always proved to be a pain in the rear

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@Matt, I can’t find off hand at the moment, it was during a law module i did. However, you need to read the department of Justice website:

“In Doe v. United States, 489 U.S. 201 (1988), the Court held that an order compelling a person to execute a form consenting to disclosure of foreign bank accounts did not violate the Fifth Amendment because the form was not testimonial. The compelled disclosure of decryption information to a third party would not seem to be any more testimonial. Moreover, we doubt whether such a disclosure would be incriminating, because unless and until the encryption product is used in the commission of a crime, the key would pose no threat of incrimination against the user.”

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/cryptfaq.htm#1a

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1996/12/30/daily12.html

There are ways round your 5th amendment ‘right’ and if the bill that is looking to be passed regarding this whole facade goes through then it will be very black and white like it is here

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@Paul, maybe one of us has miss read. It said keys to their CODE not your encryption key. I was reading that encryption tech companies now had to effectively give their algorithm or code for the software to a third party company under gov regulations. Which then allows the gov access via the third party negating the 5th Amendment violation and allowing the gov agencies easy ways of cracking the encryption on a suspects HDD.

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@David – Here’s the flaw in that: “The compelled disclosure of decryption information to a third party would not seem to be any more testimonial. Moreover, we doubt whether such a disclosure would be incriminating, because unless and until the encryption product is used in the commission of a crime, the key would pose no threat of incrimination against the user.”

Here’s why, what you posted was a response to a hypothetical plaintext regime in the FAQ section giving the DOJ’s opinion on several issues. “16. Would such a hypothetical mandatory plaintext recovery regime violate the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against compulsory self-incrimination?”

Post hard, concrete case law, such as I posted initially. Like a judge’s decision. Not the opinion of an agency.

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Hi,

I don’t think that you can really prevent a government institution to get to your data – unless you are willing to sacrifice good usability. In other words, anybody who has enough money will attack the weakest spot, and I think there’s a lot that a government can legally do that I don’t want to be subjected to.

Just think of backing up. A hard disk crash is much more likely than somebody accessing your data. Backup up an encrypted volume takes a long time even if you only copy changed data since the backup program cannot distinguish between important and unnecessary (temporary or swap) data.

I use FileVault, and my goal is to protect my privacy from the prying eyes of a thief or a technician – try getting your data off your laptop when it’s broken.

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Just to add, I use:

http://www.knoxformac.com/

I store files i wouldn’t want others getting to in a knox vault. When i want them it just mounts as an image. To be honest i couldn’t care less if the gov or police want access. As long as if my mac is lost or stolen then people who get their hands on it can’t access it….. that’s fine by me. I guess it is or is along of the lines of Apple’s Filevault….. but I don’t know many thieves that would care to try and break it. Also any machine i have is tracked by orbicules undercover. The only other thing i could implement (no idea how) is a remote ‘off swich’.

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contacted the superduper folks. next version will be wde friendly…

>The next update will be supporting whole disk encryption.
–
>Dave Nanian
>Shirt Pocket

all is good. got the dual boot going with backtrack3 for some learning. Need to get wi-fi drivers next.

going to wait on wde til duper update is out.

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Some Rumors say, that whole disk encryption, slows down your OS, is this true?

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I installed it 3 days ago. It went very smooth. Install pgp desktop, dream up a long password, let it run for about 3 hours on my Air. Upon reboot you receive a new pgp splash screen. When you enter in your password it jumbles it up a bit so that it looks like there are more letters than are actually being input.

I haven’t really used the air in production this week, but it seems fine speed-wise. I am quite happy with it.

Looking forward to a new super-duper update.

Very smooth.

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