assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

Of course I couldn’t keep my trap shut when Jacob Appelbaum recently dissed Rubberhose in a recent talk at the 22C3. So I decided to do some research into the current state of disk encryption myself. I haven’t been really following that topic since about the 2000 or 2001. I’m currently using FileVault, LUKS and GBDE on my boxen, but to be honest - even though I’m a cryptologist, I haven’t had time to research their security yet - save some failed attempts at reverse-engineering the DiskImages framework of MacOS X to figure out what exactly Apple is up to with FileVault.

The following links are without meant to be notes to self for future research.

Research papers:

I. Damgård and K. Dupont:

Universially Composable Disk Encryption Schemes (IACR ePrint, PDF)

K. Gjøsteen:

Security notions for disk encryption (IACR ePrint, PDF)

M.J. Saarinen:

Encrypted Watermarks and Linux Laptop Security (WISA 2004 proceedings, backup can be here)

Implementation reports:

Dowdeswell and Ioannidis: The CryptoGraphic Disk Driver (NetBSD)

P.H. Kamp: GBDE - Geom Based Disk Encryption (FreeBSD)

C. Fruhwirt: LUKS On-Disk Format Specification Version 1.0 (Linux, dm-crypt based)