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From: Heinz Diehl <htd@fancy-poultry.org>
To: dm-crypt@saout.de
Subject: Re: [dm-crypt] Random fill
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:28:57 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <878wh1e5p2.wl%htd@fancy-poultry.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Mahogany-0.67.1-1936-20090830-160722.00@ming.ricknet.net>

At Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:07:22 +0200,
Rick Moritz wrote:

> > Btw: why do you want to overwrite the entire partition? In my eyes, this is
> > some kind of rocket science and makes no sense, considering Kerckhoff's law.
 
> It is useful to create random data on the partition in order to hide which
> sectors contain encrypted data and which don't - this makes attacks much harder.

In my opinion, if the encryption is considered secure it doesn't mind if the attacker is
able to distinguish the ciphertext from the rest or not. The logical
consequence of this would be that "wiping" a disk by writing random data on it is
nothing but a complete waste of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27_principle

  reply	other threads:[~2009-08-30 14:24 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2009-08-29 19:58 [dm-crypt] Random fill Stroker
2009-08-30 12:07 ` Heinz Diehl
2009-08-30 14:07   ` Rick Moritz
2009-08-30 14:28     ` Heinz Diehl [this message]
2009-08-30 15:48       ` Rick Moritz
2009-08-30 20:54     ` test532
2009-08-31 10:38       ` Heinz Diehl
2009-08-31 10:50         ` test532
2009-08-31 12:45           ` Heinz Diehl
2009-08-31 13:23             ` test532
2009-08-31 16:50               ` Heinz Diehl
2009-08-30 16:32 ` Arno Wagner
2009-09-01  9:24 ` Roscoe

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