Crypto in DragonFlyBSD

Magnus Eriksson magetoo at fastmail.fm
Wed Mar 31 12:56:14 PDT 2010


On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, Matthew Dillon wrote:

   and block ciphers, is that you need a significant amount of random
   salt in each randomly accessible unit to protect against various forms
   of attack.
Against dictionary attacks, as I understand it.  The salt ensures that you 
can't just pre-generate a list of hashes once, from a huge dictionary, but 
have to attack each system separately.

The salt must still be available to the system for it to be able to 
decrypt things, which as far as I can see means outside the encrypted 
volume and readable by root -- and any attacker that can gain physical 
access.  (If it's not available to the system, it's not a salt, but 
something else, like part of the password.)


   The salt can be applied as part of the encoding/decoding
   stream (it doesn't have to be all up-front), but the question is where
   does one store that salt?
/etc/cgd/<device>.  :-)

(not world readable)

MAgnus






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