Re: hardware disk encryption?

From: atom smasher (ngbz_at_fhfcvpvbhf.bet)
Date: 10/17/04 

Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:49:40 -0400

Paul Rubin wrote:

> For a hard drive, why should you be willing to reveal any info about
> its contents? If you have 100k files and only 2 of them are
> encrypted, doesn't that tell the attacker something? If you have only
> one file on the disk (encrypted) and 98% empty space, doesn't that say
> something too? The attacker may have thought you had 80 GB of data,
> so there's no reason to reveal you only had 1 GB. As one of the
> Goldwasser/Micali papers explained, "a good disguise does not reveal
> the person's height".
>
> If you don't want to reveal info about the contents of a hard drive,
> you have to encrypt the entire drive; there's no way out.
============

this is part of what makes hardware disk encryption so much more appealing
(to me) than software disk encryption... the only thing an attacker could
learn about the contents of a disk is how much stuff there might be.

doing disk encryption in software by the OS leaves a lot of clues.
encrypting files as needed leaves even more clues.

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