From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 01:31:26 +0800
To: Michael Motyka <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Re: Stego-empty hard drives...
In-Reply-To: <v04011743b229a12c2f0b@[139.167.130.247]>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980922232331.0090ed40@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 12:06 PM 9/21/98 -0700, Michael Motyka wrote:
>Robert Hettinga wrote:
>> Stegoing an encrypted partition as "blank" hard drive space without
>> actually writing over it unless you wanted to?
>> 
>A freshly formatted partition has a fill value. Noise would indicate
>that is is not fresh. This would not be proof that it contained
>encrypted data but it would indicate some sort of use. 

Microsoft Mail and some of its broken successors keep your mail in
one big hulking file using "compressible encryption",
which may not be good enough to keep the NSA out,
but is good enough crypto to keep you from fixing it when
it gets corrupted.  
It's really a shame how often MSMail files get corrupted,
and how quickly the things can grow to 100-200MB if people from
Marketing keep sending you mail with attached Powerpoint files.
Does anybody know a compressed disk driver that lets you start
at an arbitrary offset in a file so the headers look fine?

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639