[33101] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Recovering data from encrypted disks, broken CD's
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Sat Jul 29 15:23:18 2006
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 14:48:42 -0400
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
To: leichter_jerrold@emc.com
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.61.0607281009380.2674@mental>
On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:16:23 -0400, leichter_jerrold@emc.com wrote:
>
> Encrption can be broken
> I was surprised to learn that Ontrack regularly recovers encrypted data
> on systems where the user has lost the key. "There's only a couple of
> technologies where we would run into a roadblock [such as] some of the
> new laptops that have passwords that are tied to the media and to the
> BIOS," says Burmeister. That raises the question: if they can do it, who
> else can?
>
> On encrypted systems that are more difficult to crack, OnTrack also has
> a secret weapon. "Certain situations involve getting permission to get
> help from the manufacturer," he says.
>
I wonder how accurate this is. It's certainly true that some drives have
vendor passwords to unlock them. It's hard to see how they could break
through (good) software encryption, unless the software vendor -- probably
Microsoft -- has implemented some form of key escrow, which to my
knowledge they've adamantly opposed doing. In fact, Microsoft just
withdrew an add-on feature to provide easy-to-use encrypted folders
because corporations didn't like the lack of key recovery.
--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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