The Reality of Evil Maids

There have been many attacks on whole disk encryption recently:

1. Cold Boot attacks in which keys hang around in memory a lot longer than many thought, demonstrating how information flow may be more important to watch than many acknowledge.
2. Stoned Boot attacks in which a rootkit is loaded into memory as part of the booting process, tampering with system level things, like, say, whole disk encryption keys.
3. Evil Maid attacks in which Joanna Rutkowska of Invisible Things Lab suggests tinkering with the plaintext boot loader. Why is it plain text if the drive is encrypted? Because the CPU has to be able to execute it, duh. So, it's right there for tampering. Funny thing: I suggested tampering with the boot loader as a way to extract keys way back in October of 2007 when debating Jon Callas of PGP over their undocumented encryption bypass feature, so I guess that means I am the original author of the Evil Maid attack concept, huh?

About all of these attacks, Schneier recently said:

This attack exploits the same basic vulnerability as the "Cold Boot" attack from last year, and the "Stoned Boot" attack from earlier this year, and there's no real defense to this sort of thing. As soon as you give up physical control of your computer, all bets are off.

"As soon as you give up physical control of your computer, all bets are off"??? Isn't that the point of these encryption vendors (Schneier is on the technical advisory board of PGP Corp-- he maybe doesn't add that disclaimer plainly enough). Sure enough, that's the opposite of what PGP Corp claims: "Data remains secure on lost devices." Somebody better correct those sales & marketing people to update their powerpoint slides and website promotions.

To put this plainly: if you still believe that whole disk encryption software is going to keep a skilled or determined adversary out of your data, you are sadly misled. We're no longer talking about 3 letter government agencies with large sums of tax dollars to throw at the problem-- we're talking about script kiddies being able to pull this off. (We may not quite be at the point where script kiddies can do it, but we're getting very close.)

Whole Disk Encryption software will only stop a thief who is interested in the hardware from accessing your data and that thief may not even be smart enough to know how to take a hard drive out of a laptop and plug it into another computer in the first place. You had better hope that thief won't sell it on ebay to somebody who is more interested in data than hardware.

Whole Disk Encryption fails to deliver what it claims. If you want safe data, you need to keep as little of it as possible on any mobile devices that are easily lost or stolen. Don't rely on magic crypto fairy dust and don't trust anyone who spouts the odds or computation time required to compute a decryption key. It's not about the math; it's about the keys on the endpoints.

Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) (like what Vista can be configured to use) hold out some hope, assuming that somebody cannot find a way to extract the keys out of them by spoofing a trusted bootloader. After all, a TPM is basically just a blackbox: you give it an input (a binary image of a trusted bootloader, for example) and it gives you an output (an encryption key). Since TPMs are accessible over a system bus, which is shared among all components, it seems plausible that a malicious device or even device driver could be used to either make a copy of the key as it travels back across the system bus, OR, that a malicious device could just feed it the proper input (as in not by booting the bootloader but by booting an alternative bootloader and then feeding it the correct binary image) to retrieve the output it wants.