Thursday, April 27, 2006

Deniable Encryption

I have been doing quite a bit of research in the deniable encryption area. I have looked at both TrueCrypt and RubberHose. I quickly moved away from RubberHose because of the lack of support for Windows and the lack of at least a beta version.

TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org ) is a very powerful little toolset that allows for many different TrueCrypt file systems with the availability of hidden file systems. The product allows for a user to specify a partition, file, USB key, floppy disk, or any other hard disk type to place a TrueCrypt "partition" with the possibility of hiding another partition within. The power of the hidden partition allows a user to create the outer "known" encrypted partition with an "unknown" partition within. Each partition has it's own password and when the user utilizes the TrueCrypt tool to mount the partition, depending on the password used they will mount either the outer partition or the hidden partition. The good thing about this is there is no feasible way to determine if a hidden partition exists or not. It allows for the ability to change passwords without having to re-encrypt the file, drive or partition. The TrueCrypt application can be ported to a USB key so it does not need to be installed on every system the key is plugged in to.

A couple things that would be nice would be not needing to use the TrueCrypt interface at all to mount the file system. This would keep it even more "secret" that there is a TrueCrypt filesystem on the drive. Another thing would be to allow multiple hidden partitions within a single outer partition. That was the one nice thing about RubberHose, it allowed up to 16.

Anyone have any experience with any other deniable encryption tools?

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