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Discontinued on-the-fly disk encryption utility TrueCrypt was unable to keep out the FBI in the case of a US government techie who stole copies of classified military documents. How the Feds broke into the IT bod's encrypted TrueCrypt partition isn't clear.
It raises questions about the somewhat sinister situation surrounding the software team's sudden decision to stop working on the popular project last May.
US Air Force sysadmin Christopher Glenn was sent down for 10 years after stealing military documents relating to the Middle East, in addition to copying emails controlled by the commander of a special unit that conducts military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as we reported.
Glenn, 34, had secret-level clearance, and worked at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras installing and maintaining Windows 7 systems when he swiped copies of the classified files. He was arrested, charged, and appeared before a court in the southern district of Florida, where he admitted breaking the US Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced on Friday.
According to the Sun Sentinel , the court heard a claim by Gerald Parsons, an army counterintelligence expert, that the FBI had managed to access a concealed and encrypted hard-drive partition within which Glenn had hidden the stolen files.
The hidden compartment was protected using "a complex 30-character password," Parsons said. It would take the Feds millions of years to crack it by brute force. A summary of Parsons' testimony is here [PDF].
The court heard that the partition was created using TrueCrypt, a popular source-is-available encryption tool, developed from 2004 up until last year when its anonymous developers mysteriously closed the project down.
The TrueCrypt team's decision to cease maintenance of the project made headlines in the tech world when its website was replaced with a warning against continued use of the software, with little to no explanation of why.
[...] The encryption software that Glenn used to conceal the stolen classified materials in the Synology device is a program called TrueCrypt. In October 2011, Glenn had sent an email to an associate with an internet hyperlink to an article entitled 'FBI hackers fail to crack TrueCrypt.' In this case, the FBI did decrypt Glenn's hidden files containing the stolen classified materials.
It is, of course, entirely possible the FBI or some other agency was able to extract the password from Glenn while interrogating him – the man changed his plea to guilty halfway through the case, and may have sung like a canary. Or perhaps his computer systems were bugged, revealing his encryption key. You can read his plea bargaining here [PDF].
(Score: 5, Interesting) by _NSAKEY on Wednesday August 05 2015, @11:56PM
There's also the possibility that the feds threw one of their GPU cracking clusters at the problem. I'm a beta tester for the hashcat project and have talked to some people who sell clusters of GPU password cracking rigs to everyone from small security firms to big corporations to government agencies. The government agencies tend to buy the biggest clusters, and the GPU versions of hashcat can support up to 128 GPUs. You combine that sort of raw power with an intelligent attack plan, and it's plausible that the guy's 30 character TrueCrypt pass got cracked. Also keep in mind that we don't know what the pass was yet. If his pass was a string of random characters, then I would say the TrueCrypt flaw/backdoor theory will gain a lot more currency. If it was something silly like "QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM1234," then the idea that his password just got cracked is easier to swallow. As things stand, I'm keeping an open mind because I've seen some long passes get cracked using GPUs and because of Occam's Razor. It will be really interesting to see how this story plays out, and knowing the plaintext password will go a long way toward answering that question.
(Score: 4, Funny) by steelfood on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:00PM
The password was 'hunter2'.
(Score: 1) by FunnyItWorkedLastTime on Friday August 07 2015, @12:02AM
Hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars!
http://www.bash.org/?244321 [bash.org]
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday August 07 2015, @09:29AM
You mean his password was 32 asterisks to fool the Tempest attacks on him? Sweet!
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A