Friday, December 24, 2010

Rubberhose, a defense-in-depth crypto program

Reading about the Julian Assange/Wikileaks thing, specifically Sterling's article, let me to this piece of software: Rubberhose. It's a crypto program that encrypts a whole chunk of your drive...and nestles mutliple sets of encrypted text in the same region. It also initializes the chunk by writing random bytes to it. So your real info is hidden among chunks of similar-looking noise. This mirrors an idea I had years ago...I always wondered why people didn't hide crypto in large batches of random bytes. This program does that. But it also allows you to have separate sets of data that use different keys. So, you can actually give up part of the data, and keep the rest. There's no way to tell how many different sets of data are in the encrypted chunk. It's really quite interesting.

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