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TrueCrypt "Decrypted" by FBI to Nab USAF Sysadmin

posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 05 2015, @11:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-they-had-the-password dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket found the following story on The Register:

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].

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:28AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:28AM (#218865) Journal
    No, we still really know NOTHING. As the summary says, there are still many other plausible possibilities. They could have threatened him the way they did Aaron Swartz and he might have told them his passphrase as part of a plea bargain. He might have written the passphrase down somewhere and the Feds found it. They might have planted a keylogger in his computer and gotten his passphrase while he typed it in. Truecrypt being compromised is still only one possibility of many, and even if it were the case, I doubt that they'd be dumb enough to make it a completely unambiguous possibility. Knowledge that a cryptosystem broken by someone is frequently a bigger secret than anything that may be gleaned from breaking the cryptosystem. They understood this well enough in World War II: any use of intelligence from the cracked Enigma traffic had to be plausibly obtainable by some other means, lest the Germans realise that their codes were insecure and change them to something that the Allies would not be able to so easily break.
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:58AM (#218886)

    From this we might infer that TrueCrypt is safe, a keylogger with a wrench knocked somebody on the head, and now the government is try to use this story to get people to stop using TrueCrypt.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:09AM (#218892)
      When all possibilities are more or less equally likely, there is really nothing that can be inferred.

  • (Score: 2) by No Respect on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:11AM

    by No Respect (991) on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:11AM (#218996)

    Comment deserves another +1 too bad it's maxed out already.