From: Ian Goldberg <iang@cs.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 19:34:02 +0800
To: coderpunks@toad.com
Subject: Fixes to loop.c et al. for DES,IDEA,stego now done
Message-ID: <199608062350.QAA10693@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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As I mentioned before, the hooks to DES (and IDEA; with Nicholas Leon's
patches) in loop.c and {mount,losetup}(8) are horribly broken.
For example, the DES key you type in is totally ignored, and only the first
byte of the IDEA key you enter is relevant.  As well, the DES code was using
PCBC mode, and IDEA was using ECB mode.

I've fixed the key management (the key is based on a SHA1 hash of the pass
phrase you enter), and changed both DES and IDEA to use CBC mode.

Adding other encryption methods (Blowfish, for example) should be
straightforward.  In fact, I'm planning to add a facility for dynamically
adding and removing general data transformation modules (maybe for 2.1...).

In addition, I've implemented steganography (hiding a filesystem in the low
bits of, say, an audio file), and fixed some assorted bugs in loop.c
(incorrect variables were being used in some places, and a deadlock was fixed
having to do with making a loop device on top of another loop device).

The patches are available from:

ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/filesystems/linux/index.html

Since that site seems to be down a lot, there's an alternate site:

ftp://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pub/linux-stego/index.html

Note that there's one file that contains crypto that users outside of the
US and Canada must not download.  See below for further details and
instructions.

Attached is the text version of index.html.  Share and enjoy.

   - Ian

- -----------------8<--------------------8<----------------
Encryption and Steganography for Linux

This directory contains patches to the Linux kernel to enable encryption and
steganography of filesystems. Encryption allows you to have a scrambled
partition or file that, with the proper pass phrase, you can mount, just
like a normal filesystem. Steganography allows you to hide a filesystem in
the low bits of, say, an audio file. You can even combine these two to hide
a scrambled filesystem in the low bits of an audio file (see the example,
below).

Installation instructions

  1. Get a fresh copy of linux-2.0.11.tar.gz from your favourite site.
  2. Patch it with the loopfix-2.0.11.patch file found in this directory.
     This fixes some bugs in the loop block device driver, and adds
     steganography support to it. Hopefully this will go into the standard
     kernel soon.
  3. Now you want to add cryptography support. Due to a strange US
     regulation, this has to be split up into two pieces. The first piece,
     export-2.0.11.patch, doesn't actually contain any cryptograhy; it just
     contains the changes to the Makefiles and documentation, etc. to
     reflect the eventual presence of cryptography. You should get this file
     and patch it into the result of step 2.
  4. If the site you are downloading these files from is in the US or
     Canada, you may only download the second piece, crypto-2.0.11.patch, if
     you are also in the US or Canada. If you are not, here's what's in the
     file, and where to get it:
        o The file contains the files drivers/block/idea.c, kernel/des.c,
          include/linux/idea.h and include/linux/des.h.
        o To get these files, go visit
          http://www.binary9.net/nicholas/linuxkernel/patches/ and get the
          patches des-1.0.patch and idea-1.0.patch.
        o Edit these patches and remove everything in them that isn't
          related to one of the four files listed above.
        o What you have left should be functionally equivalent to
          crypto-2.0.11.patch.
  5. Take either crypto-2.0.11.patch or what you got from outside the US,
     and patch it into the result of step 3.
  6. You now have a complete kernel. Compile as usual.

You will also need an updated version of the mount and losetup commands in
order to use this. To get these, download mount-2.5k from
ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux/util/mount-2.5k.tar.gz. Then get the patch
mount-2.5k.patch from this directory, and patch it into the sources. Compile
and install.

It would be really good if these patches to the kernel and to mount for
steganography and encryption were made standard, and enabled by default. The
reason for this is that it would be more suspicious for someone to have a
"special" kernel with stego capabilities than to just have a regular kernel,
configured in the default way.

Sample encrypted and stego'd filesystem

In this directory are two audio files. Alice-Bob.orig.au is a file I
downloaded from http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/labs/theorique/Alice-Bob.html.
The other file, Alice-Bob.au, is the same, except that it has an encrypted
filesystem hidden in the low bit of each byte. You can listen to each of
them, and see how much difference there is (it's just in the noise). To see
the filesystem, get a new kernel and mount/losetup as descibed above. Also
make sure you have loop devices in /dev/loop*, as described below. Then:

# losetup -e stego /dev/loop0 Alice-Bob.au
Use the low bits of each (b)yte, (s)hort, or (l)ong?
(Use lowercase letters for little-endian; uppercase for big-endian.)
b/s/l/B/S/L: [b]
# mount /dev/loop0 /mnt -oloop,encryption=idea
Pass phrase: What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?
# ls -al /mnt
total 220
drwxr-xr-x   3 root     root         1024 Aug  4 10:47 ./
drwxr-xr-x  23 root     root         1024 Aug  4 01:50 ../
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root        12288 Aug  4 10:46 lost+found/
- -rw-r--r--   1 root     root           71 Aug  4 10:47 passwords
- -rw-------   1 root     root       208247 Aug  4 10:47 world_domination_plans
# umount /mnt
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

Usage instructions

First, make sure you have devices called /dev/loop0, /dev/loop1, ...,
/dev/loop7. If not, make them as follows:

# cd /dev
# for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7; do mknod loop$i b 7 $i; done
# chgrp disk /dev/loop[0-7]
# chmod 660 /dev/loop[0-7]

A note on choosing pass phrases: Pass phrases can be up to 128 characters
long. It's in your best interests to choose a good one. Make it long, and
hard to guess. There are FAQs out there on how to choose a good pass phrase,
I think.

Finally, here is a copy of the file
Documentation/filesystems/loop_crypt.txt:

Encryption and Steganography for Linux
- --------------------------------------

The "loop" block device driver allows you to "hide" a filesystem in
a disk partition or in a regular file, either using encryption (scrambling
the data) or steganography (hiding the data in the low bits of, say,
a sound file).

To use this, you will need updated versions of the "mount" and "losetup"
commands.  They are both in the mount-2.5k, which you can get from

 ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux/util/mount-2.5k.tar.gz

but you will need to patch it with the changes from

 ftp://ftp.csua.berkley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/filesystems/linux/mount-2.5k.patch

Also, if you want to use DES or IDEA encryption and not just XOR (which,
encryptionwise, is really terrible), you'll need to get the crypto patches
to the kernel.  If you're in the US or Canada, you can get them from

 ftp://ftp.csua.berkley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/filesystems/linux/crypto.patch

Otherwise, check

 ftp://ftp.csua.berkley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/filesystems/linux/index.html

to see how to get them.

How to use it
- -------------

Here are a number of examples:

To create an encrypted floppy (using IDEA):

Put a floppy in drive 0.
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k seek=8
# losetup -e idea /dev/loop0 /dev/fd0
Pass phrase: (type a pass phrase here, up to 128 characters)
# mke2fs /dev/loop0
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

To use it again:
# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt -text2 -oloop,encryption=idea
Pass phrase: (type the same pass phrase)
# cd /mnt
(use the disk)
# cd /
# umount /mnt

To make a DES-encrypted filesystem in a regular file:

Decide on a filename and how big you want your encrypted filesystem to be.
Suppose you choose /root/private/rndseed as your filename, and you want
it to be 10MB (10240K).  Create it as follows:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/root/private/rndseed bs=1k count=10240
# losetup -e des /dev/loop0 /root/private/rndseed
Pass phrase: (type a pass phrase here, up to 128 characters)
# mke2fs /dev/loop0
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

To use it:
# mount /root/private/rndseed /mnt -text2 -oloop,encryption=des
Pass phrase: (type the same pass phrase)
# cd /mnt
(use the disk)
# cd /
# umount /mnt

There is an additional "feature" (well, _I_ think it's a feature) by
which you could mount the above filesystem on /root/private, even though
a file in that directory is being used to store the filesystem itself.
(Note of course that the encrypted file won't be visible when the
filesystem is mounted, and that only loop files don't count as "usage";
if you're _in_ that directory, or some process has any file in that
directory open, the mount won't work.)

To hide an IDEA-encrypted filesystem in the low bits of an audio file:

Let "penguin.au" be your sound file.
# losetup -e stego /dev/loop0 penguin.au
Use the low bits of each (b)yte, (s)hort, or (l)ong?
(Use lowercase letters for little-endian; uppercase for big-endian.)
b/s/l/B/S/L: [b]  (.au files store 1-byte samples, so say "b" here)
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/loop0 bs=1k seek=8
# losetup -e idea /dev/loop1 /dev/loop0
Pass phrase: (type a pass phrase here, up to 128 characters)
# mke2fs /dev/loop1
# losetup -d /dev/loop1
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

And to use it:
# losetup -e stego /dev/loop0 penguin.au
Use the low bits of each (b)yte, (s)hort, or (l)ong?
(Use lowercase letters for little-endian; uppercase for big-endian.)
b/s/l/B/S/L: [b]  (.au files store 1-byte samples, so say "b" here)
# mount /dev/loop0 /mnt -text2 -oloop,encryption=idea
Pass phrase: (type a pass phrase here, up to 128 characters)
# cd /mnt
(read secret info from files here)
# cd /
# umount /mnt
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

Note: if you don't have /dev/urandom, do this:

# cd /dev
# mknod random c 1 8
# mknod urandom c 1 9
# chown root.root random urandom
# chmod 666 random urandom

Last update: 19960806 by Ian Goldberg <ian@cypherpunks.ca>

This work derives from work by a number of people, including:
Werner Almesberger <almesber@bernina.ethz.ch>
Andries Brouwer <Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl>
Ian Goldberg <ian@cypherpunks.ca>
Nicholas J. Leon <nicholas@binary9.net>
Theodore Ts'o <tytso@athena.mit.edu>
Eric Young <eay@psych.psy.uq.oz.au>
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