[1941] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Speaking of rubber hoses [was Re: Storage encryption tools]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Julian Assange)
Wed Dec 10 23:46:17 1997
To: David Honig <honig@otc.net>
Cc: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>, coderpunks@toad.com,
cryptography@c2.net
From: Julian Assange <proff@iq.org>
Date: 11 Dec 1997 11:41:25 +1100
In-Reply-To: David Honig's message of "Wed, 10 Dec 1997 10:54:32 -0800"
David Honig <honig@otc.net> writes:
> At 12:12 AM 12/11/97 +1100, Julian Assange wrote:
> >
> >Speaking of rubber hose cryptography, here is a copy of some recent
> >correspondence concerning that subject:
> >
> >
> >I have designed a `cryptographically deniable' (other wise known as
> >rubber-hose-proof - a `rubber hose' being the beating weapon of choice
> >for pass-phrase extraction) file system. the file system has 0-n keys,
> >each of which divulges different data. This is essence of the
> >deniability scheme, whereby one can divulge the "duress" key which
> >will only decrypt pre-meditated "duress" information, i.e love letters
> >pertaining to some illicit, but otherwise harmless liason, as opposed
> >to Russian SS30 launch codes. The file-system has the following
> >property:
> >
>
> I've got a sketch of a similar plan in
> http://rattler.otc.net/Crypto/MyDocs/Decoy.doc
>
> If you compress cargo & decoy you may not have to explain the still-hidden
> cargo-message.
This is the problem with simple byte-interleaving - even when compressed, once
you have the decoy key, you can uncompress the decoy and show there's
`something more'.
What's "nice" about my scheme (and it really only works for encrypted file
systems), is that it's not computationally (or physically if I have my
anti-stm statistical attack method done right) feasible to show that there
is any "cargo" at all - what you are seeing as gaps between the duress
data, is exactly what you would see if the duress file-system wasn't full
(yet). i.e it's not possible given a set of duress keys to show that
the "empty" blocks are anything but empty blocks - i.e copy material into
the duress file-system and they will be assigned, and over-written as one
would expect if you only had the duress key.
--
Prof. Julian Assange |"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your
| Ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down
proff@iq.org | people's throats." -- Stolen quote from Howard Aiken
proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu | http://underground.org/book
