Feds Decrypt Laptop Without Defendant’s Help

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Remember the lady that the court ordered to cough up the password to her encrypted laptop? I guess they didn't need her password after all. Grounds for an appeal?

The authorities seized the encrypted Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with valid court warrants while investigating alleged mortgage fraud, and demanded she decrypt it. Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman in January to decrypt the laptop by the end of February. The judge refused to stay his decision to allow Fricosu time to appeal.
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guess the crooks better take note and add some more layers of encryption; the feds probably had a back door, or maybe the ex-husband did supply the password...wait and see
 
Says a co-defendent supplied the working password. Probably gotten a plea deal to flip on the other.
 
Really is too funny. The FEDs should have some super hacking programs, i'll just bet they have to pay every time they use it and didn't want to pay.

So the real question is, since she never supplied the password, and they decrypted the laptop anyway. Does this in any way help the legal case that you don't have to supply the password if the court demands you do?
 
ol1bit said:
Really is too funny. The FEDs should have some super hacking programs, i'll just bet they have to pay every time they use it and didn't want to pay.

So the real question is, since she never supplied the password, and they decrypted the laptop anyway. Does this in any way help the legal case that you don't have to supply the password if the court demands you do?
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Not really. The demand for the password was at odds with the 5th amendment.

The actual case is about mortgage fraud, and the court believed there was evidence on the laptop to help the prosecuters.

Since they now have the password, it's moot point now. Court proceedings against her on mortgage fraud will continue as normal.
 
ol1bit said:
So the real question is, since she never supplied the password, and they decrypted the laptop anyway. Does this in any way help the legal case that you don't have to supply the password if the court demands you do?
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Not really. It just side-steps the issue in this case. Since the ex-husband supposedly provided a password, the courts won't need to pursue the issue and it won't go any further. But there are other cases in the works challenging the same issue.

Pro-tip: For your disk encryption, use a password other people can't easily guess, and don't share it with ANYONE or use the same PW for ANYTHING.
 
A few possibilities:
- someone else knows the passwd or they found it written somewhere
- educated guesses
- bruteforce it (this is why you pick long passwds)
- memory analysis (many FDE tools suffer from this still, but does take specialized skill)
- undocumented backdoor (this case isn't worthy of bringing to light any gov backdoors, and I doubt the FBI would have clout like this anyway, but don't think for a second there are not ways in/around encryption x for interested govs)

I'm curious what may happen if nothing useful is found on the laptop. In that case, no 5th amendment discussion will take place since it's not incriminating.
 
It's sad that she couldn't trust her SO...

... OR maybe all he gave was a pass to the not so hidden portion of a hidden container. It would be hilarious if the FEDs gave him a deal for a bunch of family photos and some raunchy home videos. I'd love to believe it was the later, but she didn't seem terribly too smart and my faith in people in general has been on a slow decline as of late. ;)
 
I have to wonder just how many strong passwords a human is capable of memorizing. Maybe a good keyring would help, but then you should different keyrings for different levels of security.

And you also add a lot of chances for bad crypto on the keyring.
 
nsa could break -if only its for national security. plus cost of using a gray computer would cost
300,000 easily. :D best pass word --- foreing linguage frase from a book.
 
ol1bit said:
Really is too funny. The FEDs should have some super hacking programs, i'll just bet they have to pay every time they use it and didn't want to pay.

So the real question is, since she never supplied the password, and they decrypted the laptop anyway. Does this in any way help the legal case that you don't have to supply the password if the court demands you do?
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You are an idiot. one for not understanding cryptography and two for thinking the government has special kung-fu other humans dont. Cryptography is supposed to be hard, thats the whole point. I really hate the expectation that gov't should be able to backdoor everything.
 
Spire3660 said:
You are an idiot. one for not understanding cryptography and two for thinking the government has special kung-fu other humans dont. Cryptography is supposed to be hard, thats the whole point. I really hate the expectation that gov't should be able to backdoor everything.
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Plus it'd be pretty difficult to hide a backdoor in an open source solution like TrueCrypt. And the only known break for AES-256 still leaves you in the range of trillions of years to get in.

The whole reason this is such a big deal in the courts is precisely because the government is scared to death of this stuff. A properly TrueCrypt'd drive in a completely powered-down system cannot currently be broken, by the government or anyone else.

Of course if you leave Windows running but locked or are in hibernation mode, I'm pretty sure they can bust in, or at least there used to be a way to do that.
 
lordshado said:
nsa could break -if only its for national security. plus cost of using a gray computer would cost
300,000 easily. :D best pass word --- foreing linguage frase from a book.
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No. The best passwords are actually random, not psudeo random. Once you've stopped it from being random, you are a much smaller subset than the whole. 10 random letters is 141,000,000,000,000 combinations, while words from the english language are 300,000. Add in phonetic spellings and while you rise, you are going to rise from 300,000 to 600,000 at best.
 
Employ encryption that self destructs the data after so many failed attempts?
 
Even the best encryption can be decrypted it's only a matter of time. The Feds have the advantage because they are well equipped both in human know-how and in equipment. As for the 5th Amendment being violated, well now that is totally gone because she never provided the password to incriminate herself, instead the evidence was gathered and provided as required. If she was smart, she could have used the 5th in her advantage by providing the password. She will be found guilty but then appeal on the grounds of 5th that she was ordered and forced to incriminate herself with the threat of contempt. And she will win appeal and the evidence is not admissible anymore. As it stands now she has no grounds for appeal.
 
vengence said:
No. The best passwords are actually random, not psudeo random. Once you've stopped it from being random, you are a much smaller subset than the whole. 10 random letters is 141,000,000,000,000 combinations, while words from the english language are 300,000. Add in phonetic spellings and while you rise, you are going to rise from 300,000 to 600,000 at best.
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There is no such thing as a truly random number that is generated by anything, so they are all pseudorandom.
 
jiggz said:
Even the best encryption can be decrypted it's only a matter of time. The Feds have the advantage because they are well equipped both in human know-how and in equipment.
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The equipment factor is irrelevant if the strength of the encryption doesn't allow for any sort of reasonably fast cracking time. Human know-how becomes less of a factor when every user has the entire internet at his fingertips. Cases like this are interesting because they test what the government actually does know, and as far as I can tell they don't know too much (in terms of breaking it head on). I'm sure they know all about various sidestepping methods (like cold boot attacks), but as far as taking the encryption head on they're stuck. If the government is holding their "secret" weapon back I'd be surprised.
 
Tawnos said:
Pray tell how you intend to implement such a thing.
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Something like Ironkey but with an SSD on a laptop.

To take it to the absurd, you could have a 50/50 mixture of powered aluminum and magnesium with an acid initiator being released if too many attempts are made.
 
Tawnos said:
Pray tell how you intend to implement such a thing.
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In a full disk encryption scenario, I believe deleting all private keys would be sufficient. If that doesn't meet the requirements, well, you probably didn't have time for a DOD spec wipe anyway.
 
LodeRunner said:
In a full disk encryption scenario, I believe deleting all private keys would be sufficient. If that doesn't meet the requirements, well, you probably didn't have time for a DOD spec wipe anyway.
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Correct.

I guess the next question after this 5A debacle is, would your scenario (nuking the private key and rendering the data useless after X failed attempts) be considered destruction of evidence?

vengence said:
:rolleyes:
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He's not totally incorrect.

There is no such thing as a truly random number generator in computers. There are very good pseudorandom number generators that use outisde entropy like your mouse movements and keystrokes, but they are not truly random.

If your 10-digit password generator is available for someone to look at, they can figure out the pseudorandom generation algorithm, and their subset of possible passwords becomes much smaller.

This happened a few years ago to OpenSSL. Their key generation algorithm was broken, and of the billions of possible keys, it was actually only generating from a subset of ~200k keys. Huge debacle, emergency bug fix rollout, withdrawn keys, all that.
 
Eisenblut said:
Something like Ironkey but with an SSD on a laptop.

To take it to the absurd, you could have a 50/50 mixture of powered aluminum and magnesium with an acid initiator being released if too many attempts are made.
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You're assuming that the federal government is running the OS to try and decrypt the drive. That's not how it works. They take the drive out and attach it to a system with a write-blocker so that chain of evidence is preserved.

It's not like the feds are booting your computer and trying passwords that way...
 
Tawnos said:
You're assuming that the federal government is running the OS to try and decrypt the drive. That's not how it works. They take the drive out and attach it to a system with a write-blocker so that chain of evidence is preserved.

It's not like the feds are booting your computer and trying passwords that way...
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But would that method work against full disk encryption? Maybe against TrueCrypt, but what about a TPM chip based system? I thought part of the point of FDE using TPM was to prevent someone from yanking the disk, imaging or attaching it to another computer for that sort of attack.
 
Derp, forgot there's no edit. Wanted to add, I am ignorant of how computer forensics work, so I'm just asking, not challenging the statement.
 
InorganicMatter said:
He's not totally incorrect.
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Theoretically, there are no random processes at all. For the purposes of any reasonable discussion telling someone to generate a random number is reasonable.

There is no such thing as a truly random number generator in computers.
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I never said to use a computer to generate it.

If your 10-digit password generator is available for someone to look at
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I didn't give a generator. A rather simplistic one that would be good enough is to simply roll a n-sided die, 10 times.
 
Eisenblut said:
Something like Ironkey but with an SSD on a laptop.

To take it to the absurd, you could have a 50/50 mixture of powered aluminum and magnesium with an acid initiator being released if too many attempts are made.
Click to expand...

I think I saw that on one of the "Mission: Make Cruise Gay" movies.
 
Guess if I was in the states I'd know to put some kind of app on my systems that will zero out the drive if a certain password is put in, and just supply that password. Then again they could probably still recover that. Need a relay that gets activated that physically destroys the drive. Perhaps have acid pour into it or something.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Guess if I was in the states I'd know to put some kind of app on my systems that will zero out the drive if a certain password is put in, and just supply that password. Then again they could probably still recover that. Need a relay that gets activated that physically destroys the drive. Perhaps have acid pour into it or something.
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That's stupid. They'd just charge you with obstruction and destruction of evidence. The point is to not go to jail, not get off on those charges because they have better ones.
 
This is the feds doing their job.

They should have never demanded that the accused assist in the investigation against herself in the first place.
 
LodeRunner said:
But would that method work against full disk encryption? Maybe against TrueCrypt, but what about a TPM chip based system? I thought part of the point of FDE using TPM was to prevent someone from yanking the disk, imaging or attaching it to another computer for that sort of attack.
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TPM doesn't change the algorithm used to encrypt the drive, though, and I believe it's primarily used to verify boot integrity. Moreover, I don't know if it would be able to detect a write blocker/redirector. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_blocker

The short of it is, I don't think all of these "I'll enter a fake password" or "my computer will blow itself up" solutions will work.
 
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