Encrypted filesystems are hip these days, and that's good. One of
the reasons why I have not jumped on the waggon is a concern about
their safety.
When using a block cipher such as AES or similar to encode e.g.
a file of 1024 Mb, the blocks of the ciphertext are in relation to
each other. This is accomplished using methods like CBC (Cipher
Block Chaining, among others). The motivation here is to fend off
statistical (and replay) attacks.
Storage media these days are usually okay, but there have been times
when a bad block on a disk, or a corrupt byte on a flash medium have
caused trash to be returned for the block. Please correct me if I am
wrong, but with a single file spanning 1 Gb of medium, chances are
fairly high for such a bad block to happen within the file (given
that it happens at all).
If such a bad block occurs and renders a small part of the encrypted
file unreadable, wouldn't the entire partition and all its data be
effectively destroyed?
--
Please do not send copies of list mail to me; I read the list!
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org>
: :' : proud Debian developer, admin, user, and author
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!
"ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
or what's a heaven for?"
-- robert browning
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