[ale] little math

[JK]

On 2/12/2010 9:20 AM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 11:10, Geoffrey<lists at serioustechnology.com>  wrote:
>> You immediately know where I wrote the data, thus you can exclude a huge
>> portion of the drive with your attack.
>
> I don't see your point that encrypted data needs to also be hidden on
> the file system.  And I'm ok with not seeing that point. ;-)


Sorry, pedantry wins :-)

It's a lot easier to mount an attack on an encrypted data store if you
can identify which data is important.  The idea is to force the attacker
to analyze the entire 1TB drive, rather than being able to concentrate
on the 2GB of actual encrypted data.  This is also why really secure data
links transmit random data continuously -- an attacker has no idea which
data is real and which is just noise, so they have to waste a lot of
energy analyzing random junk and hope to get lucky.

-- JK


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