Re: safety of encrypted filesystems
* martin f. krafft:
> Encrypted filesystems are hip these days, [...]
Are they? I thought most of the fuzz was about encrypted block
devices.
> 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?
A corrupt sector corrupts the remaining part of the block. Block
sizes are much smaller than 1 GB because when part of a block is
changed, all the following bytes have to be rewritten (if a reasonable
the cipher mode is used).
By the way, the very fact that the block is not lost completely
indicates a major cryptographic weakness: there are no integrity
checks at all. (The constant IV problem is another one.) These
weaknesses don't matter in many scenarios, but it's still an
undesirable situation.
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