Re: storage privacy (was: Nice quiet, private, anonymous life??)

[Scott Bennett <bennett@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     On Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:13:08 +0100 "Alexander W. Janssen"
<alexander.janssen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>mark485anderson@xxxxxx schrieb:
>> Judge: "Ok you are to be held in contempt and in jail xyz, until such
>> time as you give us the pass phrase to your data"
>
>Only a matter of the UK at the moment. Bad enough though.
>
>> Most data overwrite programs take too long-you do not have that time
>> when they are knocking down your door.
>
>That's were strong encryption might work, along with enough entropy to
>claim that this is random data, and not just encrypted files. I heard,
>but haven't checked myself, that the "truecrypt"-suite offers something
>meeting this requirements.
>
>> A strong magnetic field close to the hard drive will completely destroy
>> the data making it impossible to recover. I will also probably fuckup
>> the drive mechanism, rendering the drive useless. Someone said consumer
>> demagnetizers were not sufficently strong? How do you know this?
>
>Come on, that's just a idea directly from the game "Uplink". You know
>any of those "movie-grade"-demagnetisers? You might want to check
>Powerlab's can-crusher[1] though, just for the fun of it ;-)
>
>> I have not run a tor server, so I do not know the exact requirements.
>> Can it be done from a ram drive?
>
>It could, but you'd need to make sure it doesn't swap/page down to disk,
>which would be bad.
>
     On a FreeBSD system, it is trivial to encrypt a swapping/paging area.
I simply changed the entry in /etc/fstab from

/dev/ad0s2b             none            swap    sw              0       0

to

/dev/ad0s2b.eli         none            swap    sw              0       0

and rebooted.  From that moment forward, my swap partition has been encrypted.
     I'm not a LINUX user, but I would be surprised if there were not some
similar facility in LINUX, but I haven't the foggiest notion how one would get
Windows XP to encrypt its swapping/paging file or even whether Windows XP has
that capability.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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