this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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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.
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.
Sorry. Data structures exists and uniformly random data is rare. Patterns still exists.
And deleted is a bad counter as deleted files won't have a record in the file system.