IMO, deniable
somethingencryption is just not practical in real life. Authorites can make you life real hard, or just throw you straight into jail, just by suspecting you have encrypted materials.That is the point. They cannot find it. Yes they can try to force it out of you but then they would need to know it is there.
When you get searched for drugs and they do not find any, what does lea do?
Except they know about deniability
They know it exist as a concept. They can’t prove that the specific decrypted message contains a super-secret encrypted message as well.
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they will know you have such program on your computer
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it is capable of deniable encryption
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most people use it for this exact reason
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the file size of the container will not match the size of the contents of your ‘safe’ volume
I think a reasonable person/court/judge/police/etc. would conclude that you are most likely still hiding something given all that.
I guess having a thick provisioned VM image on your laptop means that you are hiding something. Again if the evil government you are trying to hide something from doesn’t need reasonableness as a reason to detain you, then who cares? No matter what you do you are rolling the dice every time you interact with them.
Which is of course similar to the US today, so if I needed to hide something from them I’d make sure that once i’m legally compelled to give my password they at the very least wouldn’t have what they are looking for, since there is no way I could prove I didn’t have it anyway.
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The point is they don’t have to proof if a piece of random data is indeed an encrypted blob.
Imagine you passing border security and got selected for search. They found a piece of data on your device with high entropy without known headers in the wrong place. You can claim you know nothing about it, yet they can speculate the heck out of you. In more civil nations, you might got on to a watch list. In a more authoritive nations, they can just detain you.
They don’t have to prove you hiding something. The mere fact of you have that piece of high entroy data is a clue to them, and they have the power to make your life hard. Oh you said you deny them for a search? First congrats you still have a choice, and secondly that’s also a clue to them.
For more info, read cryptsetup FAQ section 5.2 paragraph 3, 5.18, and 5.21. It is written by Milan Brož who is way more experienced than me on this matter.
The most relevant part is 5.18 and it only talks about partitions not files. A file can be way more easily hidden in a partition then a partition.
It is simply no hope aginst an automated scanner. No one search for files manually today.
You cannot differentiate between random data or encrypted data, when it is done right. That is one of the reasons why you should initialize an encrypted drive with random data beforehand
That scanner is simply looking for high entropy data, and then report to its operator. It wouldn’t care if it is a drive or a volume or a file. If the entropy is high, flag it.
All random data have high entropy, same for encrypted data. The officer can see you have high entropy data then start throwing questions at you.
This community need better understanding of cryptography and how it translates to real world. Deniable encryption exists and does work on paper, but only on paper.
All random data have high entropy, same for encrypted data.
That is exactly what i said.
If random or deleted or fragmented or corrupted files will lead to me being questioned, then every data carrier will lead to a lotof questions.
I think you overvalue the skillset of border security. This may seem trivial to you but it’s uncommon to hire people trained to this level of competence and put them at every point of entry. A decent cybersecurity investigator needs a big salary.
That would probably happen if you were already a suspect of something or a high profile person and they moved in resources for you. No way border security is randomly sweeping for headers and entropy, they basically just look at it with the explorer and clone it, possibly using some software to scan for known security vulnerabilities to access encrypted parts. That would be a court ordered search or a high profile crime investigation, or maybe a really really unlucky day where the expert was already there for another reason, but the rest i agree.
If your threat model makes you a high profile person, then smuggling data in hidden containers is definitely not the best solution. A non associated personal cloud server is best.
Is it really though? I would assume there would be automated systems that can do 80% of the job. It can be as simple as a USB key holding a portable executable that can run and connect to a remote system and report back the findings which the officer can just read the report in plain English. Training, of course, is expensive and rarely do so, but automation can get somewhere close relatively inexpensive.
