Compliance Toolkit

Story: Police want power to seize encryption keys

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I believe some years ago some Israel scientists proved that PGP can be broken by means of some sort of brute force attack within 8 hours using about a 1000 common PC's or so. Now legally I can't own a botnet of that size (or any size) so I can't point out in public how wrong you are but you might want to rethink how secure any data is if someone with enough resources really wants to break it. Some might think that the police would have enough resources. At least more then most others.

As for forensics getting interested in a suspicious computer. I would advise to be far more interested in the communications eminating from that computer then the actual files on that computer. Reason being that there's no way of knowing what kind of tampering could have been done on that computer off-line while the same can't be said from the captured communications eminating from that computer if captured under the right (legal) circumstances.

Furthermore, there are tons of ways to hide data. The worst thing to do is to concentrate on anything that is within the control of the suspect (like the local computer). One needs to concentrate on anything that's (mostly) outside of the control of the suspect.

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