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Passware release Bitlocker/Truecrypt Decryption Tool
Following on from my post “10 Things You Don’t Want To Know About Bitlocker”, “TPM Undressed” and “Firewire Attacks Revisited” it recently came to my attention that Passware, Inc. A feisty California company has released a version of their forensic software which will decrypt Bitlocker and TrueCrypt protected hard disks via the classic Firewire vulnerabilities.
A full write-up can be found on the Passware site, but simply, given a machine that’s running, but has encrypted drives (for example one using Bitlocker in TPM-only mode, or a machine which is suspended, not hibernated). As to how to do it, well they have implemented the exploit in a very neat and usable way:
Evil Maid, another nefarious trojan attack..
Last month Joanna Rutkowska posted a very interesting article showing a practical “Evil Maid” attack against the open-source TrueCrypt FDE product. The attack is reasonably simple, subvert the pre-boot authentication engine of the full-disk encryption product in question to add a password-sniffing routine, then wait for the unsuspecting user to authenticate to their machine and then retrieve the credentials at a later stage.
Evil Maid is simply hooking the pre-boot code of TrueCrypt and adding a routine to store the users password. Because the TrueCrypt code is quite simple, it’s a relatively easy thing to do, but the attack is theoretically valid regardless of this fact, just the effort to make the hook code increases with the sophistication of the pre-boot environment. Read more…
Cold Boot Attacks Revisited (again).
Following my recent post on FireWire Attacks, I thought I’d follow up on that other classic Full Disk Encryption exploit, The “Cold Boot Attack”.
Back in February 2008 a group of clever Princeton students published their infamous paper “Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys“. Though the retention of data in RAM chips has been known since their invention, and certainly since at least 1978, The “Princeton Paper” reminded us that when you turn a computer off, it does not mean all the data from memory is instantly gone, and of course, if something important remained, like an encryption key, then your computer security might be vulnerable. Read more…
TrueCrypt vs Peter Kleissner, Or Stoned BootKit Revisited..
Peter Kieissner
This weeks flame war between TrueCrypt and Peter Kleissner had me both upset and laughing at the same time.
For a start, hats off to young Peter (18 years old according to his site), who recently presented at Black Hat his concept for a “universal rootkit” exploit, which, using that older-than-he-is technology of MBR replacement, manages to subvert Windows in such a way as to be able to drop a payload into memory as the computer boots.
I’m not sure, but isn’t that what MBR viruses have done since day one? I guess Peter agrees because his new “Stoned Bootkit” rootkit is named “Stoned” in homage to one of the original MBR Viruses of 1987 Read more…
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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