Lazybit

I was asked what makes Private Disk better than the hardware-based encryption solution offered by another company. The name of the other solution will not mentioned, because it is not relevant - the arguments are valid in either case.

The discussion is about Private Disk vs. a hardware based encryption solution that is built into a 4 GB USB disk.

Note that some of the points were taken out of context, so they may sound a bit weird (us = Dekart, them = "the other company").

• They use the same algorithm for encryption, AES-256. Our implementation is certified by NIST (we also have certifications for the used hashing algorithms). Having a certification makes it clear that you're dealing with someone who is not just an amateur cryptographer; many other competing solutions use implementations that were not tested by an unbiased third party. So this makes a difference, because not all implementations are equally correct and effective.
• "The software needs to be able to access, for example, a private key. Software and hardware debuggers can monitor the software and capture the private key for rogue use".
  
  The fact that the keys are stored somewhere is obvious. Getting them out of there is non-trivial; I have recently answered a similar question on our forum.
  
  
  Since our solution uses a driver, the encryption key is stored in the system's kernel memory, which cannot be accessed by user-mode processes (unless a user-mode program 'asks' the driver to pass it some data and the driver complies; Private Disk is built in a way that the key is 'forgotten' immediately and only known to the driver, and there is no option in the driver to pass it back to anyone - even Private Disk itself).
  
  
  In their case, they don't use a driver, so there must be a user-mode program which takes your password and passes it to the device. That's the weak spot, so I would definitely start with that point. Analyzing the memory of a user-mode process requires much less skills than in the case of a driver (when I say "less" I don't mean "piece of cake", everything is relative).
  
  
  
  In other words, before the key reaches the device, it is subject to the same threats.
• They may also use "zero performance penalty" as a factor that makes a big difference. That's correct, software encryption will obviously take some CPU cycles, but with today's modern computers this is not that critical anymore. I am not saying that "Private Disk is very slow, but with a fast computer you won't notice anything anyway"; In fact I must point out that Private Disk is a very well-designed tool, it has a low memory footprint and it never was, nor it will ever be a performance hog. It is also able to run on Windows 9x machines, besides the modern Windows NT-based systems.
• Another point is that since we're providing everything in software - we can provide updates easier. When AES-256 becomes outdated, it's a matter of updating the program. In the case of hardware it's also a matter of "getting rid of" a device (multiply that by N - how many devices you have in the company).
• Flash memory has a finite number of write cycles (of course this problem is being dealt with, and technology evolves; and this finite number is big enough already) - so you might have to replace the device sooner, because you have to make sure the device is not 'worn out'.

Other significant things, Private Disk is better because:

• we provide backup functions - so you can have an encrypted backup outside the flash disk (for archive purposes)
• you can create images of very large sizes and store them anywhere (remote share, DVD, laptop... you name it). You are not tied to a flash disk;
• Private Disk can work with multiple encrypted drives at the same time, the drives can be of different sizes, file systems
• you can store database files inside a virtual disk, share them across the network - this would not be possible with the USB storage (too slow, too many write operations, size constraints)
• Private Disk can be configured in a way that allows different users to access the same image using different passwords
• Disk Firewall - this is something nobody else has - an application level filter that prevents other programs from accessing the contents of the protected disk. For instance, once the disk is mounted - a virus can infect it, or simply copy its contents elsewhere. In the case of Private Disk - this is impossible, because untrusted programs will be rejected. This brings data protection to an entirely new level - you don't need an antivirus or antispyware, because Disk Firewall takes care of that, and there is no need to update every day, or pay for updates.
• We provide helpful support. I once tried to find something out and contacted their helpdesk - never received a reply. Perhaps things would have been different if I indicated that I was planning to make a major purchase? There is a chance that their reply was marked as spam (though I checked my filter and nothing was there), so I don't really have the right to say their support team is not effective.
  

From the points above, the ones that matter the most to me (as an end user) are: Disk Firewall, and the ability to create encrypted disks of very large sizes (it will take a long time until USB flash disks are of at least 100 GB in size, and work as fast as a hard disk) - this gives me the chance to use encryption for serious activities (storing my mail archive on it, or a database, or the company's CVS repository, etc). Of course, people are different, so your mileage may vary.

Sometimes things go wrong, Windows crashes with a blue screen of death (also known as a BSoD), resetting the computer.

The blue screen contains some information about the cause of the error, often that information can help you solve the problem almost immediately. However, most systems are configured to restart automatically when a blue screen occurs, thus there is not enough time to actually read the text on the blue screen.

You're missing a great deal of data - the name of the faulty driver, the code of the error itself, and some addresses which might be useful later.

To prevent that from happening, Windows can be configured not to restart the system automatically when such a crash occurs. This gives you enough time to analyze the data on the blue screen and figure out whether something can be done about it.

To do that:

1. Open the System properties dialog (you can get there by pressing Win+Pause)
2. Go to Advanced\Startup and recovery
3. Press Settings
4. Uncheck Automatically restart

From now on, you'll have plenty of time to enjoy the view of the blue screen, it will be displayed until you press the reset button (laptop owners beware: if you don't have a reset button, you'll have to turn the system off, then turn it back on).

Basic troubleshooting steps

• If you're lucky, the blue screen will contain the name of the faulty driver, the one that caused the problem. Usually it is a *.sys file. Copy the name of that file and see if you can find any info on it on the Internet. Usually the first results will point you to pages which explain which program the driver belongs to, so now you know that you can boot into Safe Mode and remove the offending application.
• Alternatively, you may figure out that the blue screen started to occur after you've installed a particular program or a device driver - so obviously the first thing to do is try to remove that program and install a newer version.
• Microsoft provides a list of errors shown on the blue screen, as well as their detailed descriptions. It's a good idea to take a look at that list and find out the meaning of PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA or IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Minidump - what do I do with it?
By default Windows will create a minidump, and store it to %windir%\minidump. The minidump contains information about the state of the system before the crash; these data can be used to understand what caused the error, and how to fix it (once you find the offending driver, it's a good idea to contact the authors of that module and give them the minidump as well).

Note that interpreting a minidump is not easy if you are not an experienced developer. You are more likely to have a positive result if you try the tips described above. If nothing helps, get hold of the created minidump and send it to someone who knows what to do with it.

If you want to give it a try yourself, use Microsoft's Debugging tools for Windows. Once you run the debugger, go to File\Open crash dump, and then you're on your own.

How to enable minidumps
Some may choose to disable the creation of minidumps (to save space perhaps?), but they are very important when troubleshooting a problem. To enable the minidumps:

1. Press Win+Pause to start the System Properties dialog;
2. Go to Advanced\Startup and recovery;
3. Ensure that Write debugging information is set to Small memory dump (64 kb).

Happy troubleshooting!

How can people be assured 100% that you don’t use all those accounts and passwords?

Couldn’t there be a hidden program that runs secretly to send all that information to a remote capture system?

You can be 110% sure that none of your credentials are sent to us, you can verify that yourself.

Password Carrier never establishes any network connections, so your data cannot be sent anywhere by our program. The only exception is if you have update checks enabled; in that case, the program will connect to dekart.com and retrieve a small text file, which contains information about the new versions, if they are available.

You can disable the automatic update checker, and in that case Password Carrier will be completely isolated from the Internet.

If you have updates enabled, you can use a network sniffer (such as Wireshark), to see which data are actually sent/received by the program, and make sure that you are indeed dealing with a small text file which contains the number of the latest version.

Further, you can examine the program with various tools in order to monitor Password Carrier's file-system behaviour. If you do that, you will notice that Password Carrier does not start other processes which could perform network transfers; nor it writes sensitive data to obscure locations in the file system.

The drawing below shows that:

• Password Carrier does not 'talk' to any web-sites directly
• It only interacts with your system's browser, and then the browser itself will communicate with each web-site

The time has come, Private Disk 2.10 is now officially released. Some of the changes were already commented in the release notes of an earlier beta version of PD (those features are Disk Firewall's training mode, trusted program authenticity verification).

One of the most important things is compatibility with Windows Vista systems of all flavours that exist out there. Private Disk is now shipped with digitally signed drivers, so if you have a 64-bit Vista platform - you can use PD on it. This makes Private Disk yet again compatible with every version of Windows (starting with Windows 95).

There is also a new icon, which looks good whether you're looking at a zoomed in version, or at a tiny icon in a "list view".

Run Private Disk as a service

This is a very handy option, it used to be a part of the older 1.x versions of Private Disk Multifactor. Once this is enabled, you can run Private Disk, mount the image, then log off - the virtual drives will still be mounted, allowing other logged on users to access them (including those who access them from the network, if they are shared).

The idea is that you can mount the disk and restrict others from changing its settings (ex: alter the white-list, or change the disk's properties, etc). As an administrator, you can start the server and mount the disk, then share it; from that point on end-users can connect to the server and use what they are allowed, without being able to do (break) anything. This feature will help you offer users only as much power as they need to get their job done.

PD File Move - the secure data migration utility

This is the newest addition to Private Disk's arsenal, and it was not a part of any of the beta versions that were made public prior to the release (although the utility itself could be downloaded from the site, if you explored it thoroughly). It is designed to find a group of wanted files in a certain location, create an encrypted disk of the right size, move them to the protected storage vault, and then wipe the originals, so that the files cannot be recovered.

This is a typical screenshot of PD File Move

What can it do?

• Let's say you have a music archive you want nobody to see. Just tell PD File Move that you want to look for MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, WMA and OGG files (you can add your own extensions too) in D:\. The program will find all those files, and then securely move them to the new location. Afterwards there's no trace of the original files, if you used the file wiping option.
• You purchased a new computer in your office, you want to move all the data from the old machine to it. You don't remember clearly where all the documents are, but you know that you work with PDF, DOC and ODT files. PD File Move will find them for you, so there is no chance that you accidentally forgot to copy something before giving the old computer to a relative, or donating it to a school.

We decided not to bring these features into Private Disk itself, and instead have a separate utility to do the job. Private Disk continues to be extremely lightweight (using about 2.5 MB of RAM when disks are mounted), and PD File Move will not get in your way while you use Private Disk.

We are against bloatware, so you can be sure that Private Disk will continue to be a fast and solid tool, and it will never turn into a performance hog.

Here comes the changelog of the final version:

+ added XP-style and Vista-style icons
+ allows to run Private Disk software as a system service

+ added Disk Firewall Program integrity verification feature
+ allows to disable/enable Disk Firewall Program integrity verification

+ added Disk Firewall Traning Mode feature
+ allows to disable/enable Disk Firewall Traning Mode

+ compatibility with Windows Vista
+ compatibility with Windows Vista x64

+ the encryption password can be changed when the disk is mounted
+ allows to create a backup copy of a disk's encryption key automatically

+ optimized disk creation speeds when "fill disk with random data" is enabled
- fixed bug with occasional blue screen errors if Windows Defender is installed

- fixed bug with autorun.inf on USB-drives

Enjoy using the software!

If you're monitoring the pulse of the IT world, you probably stumbled upon this story:

ElcomSoft has discovered and filed for a US patent on a breakthrough technology that will decrease the time that it takes to perform password recovery by a factor of up to 25. ElcomSoft has harnessed the combined power of a PC's Central Processing Unit and its video card's Graphics Processing Unit. The resulting hardware/software powerhouse will allow cryptology professionals to build affordable PCs that will work like supercomputers when recovering lost passwords.

Now, let me translate that into plain English - they can use the computer's video card to speed up the process of brute-forcing a password. Modern computers have powerful video cards, and it is a pity to let them do nothing while the CPU is working hard.

The part which I find funny is "discovered a breakthrough technology". Was it hidden somewhere in the snows of Siberia, or in the sands of Sahara? ... waiting for hundreds of years for someone to come and discover it... How about "develop" or "invent"?

If I ignore that and only consider the serious stuff, there are several things that I have to say:

• This is not new, and others have been using the GPU to process data for quite some time;
• While this does make things a bit faster for the attacker, you should not worry - just add one more letter to your password and you've made their job 26 times slower. And that's a conservative estimate, because we're only dealing with letters. How about making it a bit more complicated and using small-case and upcase letters? How about signs like these: "!#%^*@?", numbers, foreign languages? If you use a character-set that goes beyond the 26 small latin letters, making the password one character longer makes the promised x25 speed-up completely useless;
• Another thing is that a video card with plenty of horse power is very expensive, so it is difficult to imagine how such a "supercomputer" is affordable. Finally, I would rather invest my funds into more RAM or a better CPU, instead of getting a better video card (but that's me, a 99% non-gamer).

So, if that story made you a bit worried of your privacy, you can relax now. Either of these tips will help you out:

• Use a stronger password (either longer, or use one with unusual characters, or do both);
• Switch to smart-cards and tokens, coupled with biometric authentication;