Re: Undocumented Bypass in PGP Whole Disk Encryption

Victor Duchovni <Victor.DuchovniMorganStanley.com>
writes:
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 02:37:21PM -0500,
travis+ml-cryptographysubspacefield.org wrote:
>> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/0
4/1639224&from=rss
>>
>> Interesting quote:
>>
>> Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corp., responded
that this [previously
>> undocumented] feature was required by unnamed
customers and that
>> competing products have similar functionality.
>
>The article is sensational nonsense. The quote is right
on the money,
>businesses require disk encryption companies to support
one time unprotected
>reboot (enabled securely before reboot) to support
automated rebuilds.

Specifically, the capability exists to allow a one-off
unattended reboot of
servers, i.e. you tell the program that at the next reboot,
it should
automount the drive without stopping to ask for the password
so that the
reboot can continue.  Without this, it would be impossible
to run servers with
encrypted drives.  The mysterious "unnamed
customers" was a misrepresented
reference to sysadmins who needed the capability to run
their machines.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Peter.

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