Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
DRIVECRYPT: FOILING LAPTOP BORDER SEARCHES
June 9, 2008
Ah, those pesky Customs agents who insist on searching laptops with nary a probable cause in sight. Most of the time, the offending material discovered is child pornography. As always in the world of electronic evidence, law enforcement is limping (badly) behind technology. Witness the fact that SC Magazine recently awarded its Best Intellectual Property Protection award to DriveCrypt, a powerful full disk encryption software package with pre-boot authentication that allows for the hiding of the entire operating system.
Now mind you, hiding child porn was not the intent of this software (I’m sure the thought was the protection of proprietary data), but it surely can be used to hide criminal undertakings of any kind. So when the nice customs official asks for your passphrase, you provide a pre-arranged phony one, which thereupon provides a splendid set of entirely false and innocuous data – and everyone goes away happy.
As the Wicked Witch of the West exlaimed in the Wizard of Oz, “What a world! What a world!”
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