Corruption & Security

This time it’s actually an afternoon thought. So let’s say you will be traveling from one country to another and you have stored your truecrypt container on a remote site. There is a chance someone might steel it and try to brute force it. Usually if you are paranoid enough a brute force on a truecrypt container is well…useless. Because you are THAT paranoid you actually also want to make sure that a brute force on your container really is futile. So how about corrupting the container in a controlled way? Check out the file format specifications: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=volume-format-specification.

A good option would be to change the 4bytes of the encrypted TRUE string to some random bytes. Make sure u have a backup of the original bytes(preferably memorized). This should prevent the successful decryption of the container even if someone has the correct password.

It’s security by obscurity but hey…you can never have enough layers of security. Another interesting idea is to modify the truecrypt source/binary on your hard disk to use the string FOUR instead of TRUE for the whole decryption verification. So unless they also steel your modified version of the truecrypt binary they will not be able to open it.

Just to make sure…the above ideas are only an ADDITIONAL security layer and it CAN be broken if detected by an adversary. I just thought it would be fun to have an additional layer of security on my truecrypt containers.