Posted on 10/18/2008 11:38:09 AM PDT by BGHater
Defendants can't deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled.
The case marked an interesting challenge to the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which in part compels someone served under the act to divulge an encryption key used to scramble data on a PC's hard drive.
Failure to do so could mean a two-year prison sentence or up to five years if the case involves national security.
The appeals court heard a case in which two suspects refused to give up encryption keys, arguing that disclosure was incompatible with the privilege against self incrimination.
One of the suspects had been ordered not to move house without permission under a terrorism-prevention act. The man defied the order, and he and another man were arrested, according to the ruling from the England and Wales Court of Appeal Criminal Division.
Police also seized encrypted material on a disc belonging to the first man. When the second man was arrested, police saw he had partially entered an encryption key into a computer.
In its ruling, the appeals court said an encryption key is no different than a physical key and exists separately from a person's will.
"The key to the computer equipment is no different to the key to a locked drawer," the court found. "The contents of the drawer exist independently of the suspect; so does the key to it. The contents may or may not be incriminating: the key is neutral."
The right against self incrimination is not without bounds, as suspects also can't refuse to give a DNA sample if properly compelled.
RIPA, passed in 2000 by the U.K. Parliament, is intended to give police new powers to conduct covert surveillance and wiretap operations in respect to new communication technologies.
The third part of RIPA concerning the disclosure of encryption keys came into force in October 2007. It was delayed since when RIPA was approved, law enforcement wasn't seeing wide use of encryption. It was also one of the more controversial parts of RIPA, as critics said companies could be at risk if law enforcement mishandled their data.
To obtain a key, a so-called "Section 49" request must first be approved by a judicial authority, chief of police, the customs and excise commissioner or a person ranking higher than a brigadier or equivalent. Authorities can also mandate that recipients of a Section 49 request not tell anyone except their lawyer that they have received it.
It’s easy to encrypt data with 2 keys. One key unlocks one set of data and the other unlocks the data you actually want to keep confidential. There is NO way to prove that a second key exists.
This sort of scheme does take a larger amount of disk space to implement, but whether or not a second data set exists the total size will be padded out to provide plausible deniability.
TrueCrypt does this sort of thing when it creates a secret op system on your boot hd.
I created a small utility app a few years ago that encrypted files using randomly generated weak keys.
The idea was that you would always need to run the utility to crack the encryption using brute force. The idea I had was that people could encrypt files placed on usenet or P2P and anyone wanting to quickly and easily sift through a huge number of files would then need a supercomputer to brute force the zillions of keys.... making it not so easy to do any more. But still easy for people to use since it took only a few minutes to crack each individual key.
Well then they can ask for any object and get into anything you own. Whatever thing lets them in is ‘neutral.’
“NO PRIVACY FOR YOU!” /soup-nazi
A dual key mode can be used. One key is the true key. This key will cause the normal decryption mode to be used and will result in a clear text disk. The other key is a start key. This key is the first key in a sequence of keys, each of which is easily derivable from the preceding key. When any of these keys are input as the key, the second ‘decryption’ mode goes into operation. The second mode mimics the normal mode, but instead of decrypting, it overwrites the file with a fixed pattern. If this is done correctly, the incriminating files will be overwritten as they are ‘decrypted’. The sequence of easily derivable keys is used to enable someone to repeatedly give false keys that will activate the second mode.
If you are in jail and being interrogated for the key, the sequence of keys allows you to indefinitely postpone giving them the real key, provided that the derivation method does not yield a sequence that repeats after too few keys or yields the actual true key.
Note that if you are being held in jail until you give up the key and know that giving up the key will net you 20 years in prison, you have the motivation to keep giving keys of the second kind for as long as the police want to keep at the case.
Why not develop or sell software that uses two keys.
An entry key and an erase key.
When the authorities ‘request’ you provide the access key, you give them the system erase/delete key which wipes the drive completely clean.
I assume they would clone the HD they are wanting to decrypt and do any work on the cloned drive.
If they did manage to wipe the cloned drive, they would just start over from the master drive in your computer or one of the copies they made earlier.
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