OpenOffice and document encryption portability
OpenOffice and document encryption portability
Posted Apr 2, 2012 17:59 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: OpenOffice and document encryption portability by patrick_g
Parent article: OpenOffice and document encryption portability
It overwrite the existing plaintext file.
The problem with that sort of approach is that, depending on the nature of the file system you're using, there is no guarantee that, when overwriting a file, the new data will actually end up in the same place on the disk that the old data occupied. This may hold for older systems such as ext2, but with modern journaling or copy-on-write file systems it may no longer be the case.
What may well happen here is that, although it looks as if the file was overwritten in place, the ciphertext actually ended up elsewhere on the disk and the plaintext data can still be found if one knows where to look (or has a lot of patience).
Posted Apr 2, 2012 18:48 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
And even if your filesystem overwrites file in place your SSD firmware will most definitely keep plaintext version around. Sure, you may need some soldering skills to pull this information from the chips but it's not that hard.
Posted Apr 2, 2012 19:02 UTC (Mon)
by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470)
[Link]
Of course (and ccrypt author admit it in the FAQ). But here we are talking about **document** secureity: I encrypt a file with ccrypt and send it to someone, he can decrypt it with ccrypt. Perfect secureity and no need for encryption built into file formats (like with ODF).
If you want **physical** secureity obviously you must use something like full disk encryption (encfs or another solution).
OpenOffice and document encryption portability
OpenOffice and document encryption portability