Secure Drive is now obsolete

Secure Drive, the disk encryption system written by me and improved by
Edgar Swank, has been completely rewritten by two programmers in the
Netherlands, Max Loewenthal and Arthur Helwig. I was not aware of this
until I saw the program yesterday.

They changed it to Secure Device. It still uses the IDEA algorithm, but
you no longer have to create a partition! Secure Device uses a file as a
phantom partition, like Stacker or inDiskreet. It has a .SYS driver of
about 6K. There is a login program, or you can use another TSR which does
a pop-up login prompt. There is also keyboard logout and time-delay logout.

Another advantage of Secure Device is ease of backup. You just backup the
container file onto your tape, and the data stays encrypted. Secure Device
includes source code and is copylefted.

FTP wuarchive.wustl.edu, /pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/cryptography/secdev11.arj. 

--- Mike

I just started using this program (secure device) yesterday. I love the 
concept, however there is something that bugs the hell out of me... I set 
it up for a 30-meg encrypted 'volume', and the file is indeed about 30 
megs. However when I 'log in' to it, a dir shows only about ten megs of 
space. I tried creating an additional secure device volume, and this one 
was 25 megs on the outside and a bout 8 megs on the inside.  From what I 
glean from Applied Cryptography, IDEA usualy produces cyphertext 
approximately the same size as the cleartext, right? so why the massive 
difference in available space?

Happy Hunting, -Chris.

______________________________________________________________________________
Christian Douglas Odhner     | "The NSA can have my secret key when they pry
cdodhner@indirect.com	     | it from my cold, dead, hands... But they shall
pgp 2.3 public key by finger | NEVER have the password it's encrypted with!"
cypherpunks         WOw            dCD           Traskcom          Team Stupid
  Key fingerprint =  58 62 A2 84 FD 4F 56 38  82 69 6F 08 E4 F1 79 11 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sat, 30 Apr 1994, Mike Ingle wrote:

> Secure Drive, the disk encryption system written by me and improved by
> Edgar Swank, has been completely rewritten by two programmers in the
> Netherlands, Max Loewenthal and Arthur Helwig. I was not aware of this
> until I saw the program yesterday.
> 
> They changed it to Secure Device. It still uses the IDEA algorithm, but
> you no longer have to create a partition! Secure Device uses a file as a
> phantom partition, like Stacker or inDiskreet. It has a .SYS driver of
> about 6K. There is a login program, or you can use another TSR which does
> a pop-up login prompt. There is also keyboard logout and time-delay logout.
> 
> Another advantage of Secure Device is ease of backup. You just backup the
> container file onto your tape, and the data stays encrypted. Secure Device
> includes source code and is copylefted.
> 
> FTP wuarchive.wustl.edu, /pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/cryptography/secdev11.arj. 
> 
> --- Mike
> 
>

> However when I 'log in' to it, a dir shows only about ten megs of 
> space. I tried creating an additional secure device volume, and this one 
> was 25 megs on the outside and a bout 8 megs on the inside.
> ____________________________________________________________________________
> Christian Douglas Odhner  
> cdodhner@indirect.com	    

	I think it's a bug and I've written Arthur Helwig about it.. I'll
post the jist of his response when I get it.  I had made a 50MB partition
and got only 18MB out of it.. but a 1MB partition gave me a full MB.  I
assume it's another problem with MKVOLUME.  The one released with 1.1
had a limit of 8MB.. maybe this release has some ratio limit problem.. 

	BTW:  Has anybody inspected the code for SecureDevice?  I'm going
to look at it right now but I'd easily miss weaknesses in the implementation
of IDEA. 

TTFN

P.S. are Tacky Tokens still being processed?  I never got any response to
my GIF FOR SALE post a while back.  It's only 5 tt. so get two today. 
-- 
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Can SecureDevice be used to mount from a network volume?  This would be
a very very useful feature, although I'd imagine a total headache to
actually implement...

The one thing I dislike about SecureDevice (even before using it) is that
it can be zapped by a frustrated would-be-codeanalyst...  Of course now
that we can back it up to tape, it's not that big an issue. :-)

Also, the old SecureDrive program had a protection feature in the TSR, but
in any case, it wouldn't help if the TSR was killed off, or if our bad-guy
booted from a floppy.  He could still kill the drive...

But that's not too huge an issue as anyone can zap your hard drive if they
wanted to in any case... :-I