Undocumented Bypass in PGP Whole Disk Encryption 316
A non-mouse Coward writes "PGP Corporation's widely adopted Whole Disk Encryption product apparently has an encryption bypass feature that allows an encrypted drive to be accessed without the boot-up passphrase challenge dialog, leaving data in a vulnerable state if the drive is stolen when the bypass feature is enabled. The feature is also apparently not in the documentation that ships with the PGP product, nor the publicly available documentation on their website, but only mentioned briefly in the customer knowledge base. Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corp., responded that this feature was required by unnamed customers and that competing products have similar functionality."
Re:PGP or not so PGP? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fine by me.. (Score:5, Informative)
This actually DOES sound like a very good feature and I would hope other products have it, too. Wish the editors would RTFA, too...
Re:Did anyone read the response? (Score:5, Informative)
They need to do unattended automated reboots of thousands of computers. These are enterprise customers.
They have the encryption key, and they want to apply security updates and reboot the computers. When the employees come to work in the morning, they expect the computers to be on and operational, as they left it.
If you don't use the feature, then it poses no risk. If you need to apply unattended updates to computers on a large scale, going to each computer and typing in the passphrase is not practical.
This is a non-issue, and a FUD article. You need to have UNLOCKED access to the encrypted volume to enable this feature.
Normal users using PGPDisk and not using this feature are at no greater risk for it existing.
Many products allow disabling preboot auth (Score:5, Informative)
The software has a feature called "Pre-boot Authentication", by which the encryption software is loaded after the bios, but before the (generally Windows) operating system. The user's password is used to generate the decryption key, so theorhetically not even the NSA could decrypt the laptop without the user's password.
Here's the flaw - the software has a checkbox to disable Pre-boot authentication. What this does is generate a default user with a random password, and then store this random password obfuscated but in clear-text in the same disk area decryption software. When you talk to the sales-people, they sell this as a feature, in fact about half of Utimaco's customers (so I'm told) run it in this mode because the encryption becomes transparent and it is much less intrusive on the user. (Basically the disk is automatically decrypted each time the laptop is booted, but you have to have a valid Windows login to get in.) Buried in the help documentation are warnings "For security reasons, you should Never disable pre-boot authentication". So the engineers and the company know the weakness of disabling pre-boot authentication, but they don't tell their customers when they sell the software.
Today it seems to break into these laptops with pre-boot authentication disabled you would need somewhat sophisticated tools and techniques, basically the same tools and techniques people commonly use to "crack" commercial software today. But I'm guessing that it won't be very long before someone takes the time to build this crack and releases it, rendering the laptop encryption useless to anyone who can Google for "Utimaco Crack", etc. Basically all the crack would need to do is grab the default user's password off the disk and use or duplicate the decryption algorithms that are also in clear-text on the disk.
I've talked to a number of IT security folks, and basically it seems like most people trust the sales folks and don't understand that its basically impossible to have strong encryption without having the decryption key stored off the disk (like on a smart card, or in the brain of the user.)
Re:Why is he modded down? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did anyone read the response? (Score:4, Informative)
TrueCrypt and GPG (Score:1, Informative)
My experience of whoever it is who sells PGP is that there are other issues about they way they do business, too.
That's why open source encryption is so important. TrueCrypt [truecrypt.org] supports Windows and Linux. Supports encrypted devices and encrypted folders, including hidden folders.
To encrypt a file, use the free open source Gnu Privacy Guard [gnupg.org].
They can't do whole hard disk encryption, but they are at least honest.
Re:Why is he modded down? (Score:5, Informative)
There isn't a backdoor. If you encrypt your hard drive, then lose it, nobody can read it.
If on the other hand, if you've encrypted your boot disk, and you want to remotely reboot your machine, you're going to need someway to feed the password to it before it can bring up the OS (and the networking layer).
This feature allows you to store a password for 1 time use. Then you reboot the machine, and when it comes up, it reads the password and erases it.
It's a useful feature. Doesn't effect you if you don't use it. Even if you do use it, you'd have to set the password then forget to reboot for it to be a problem.
Basically this whole story is a non-issue. The moderation on the grandparent is a reflection of his failure to reason through this.
Re:closed source encryption software??!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not turned off by default (Score:3, Informative)
Sheesh.
Re:Many products allow disabling preboot auth (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is a company may have thousands of laptops in the wild and Active Directory passwords that expire every 90 days. Because the PBA credentials aren't integrated with AD that means you have a nightmare password management situation. Utimaco does provide a server to try to alleviate this problem, but it's still a major management pain.
It's true that by default the PBA bypass key gets stored obfuscated but in plain text on the hard drive if you bypass PBA. But if you have a modern computer with a trusted platform module (TPM) you can configure SafeGuard Easy to store the key there. You can also bind the hard drive to that particular TPM chip so that it is unaccessible if attached to another computer.
http://americas.utimaco.com/safeguard_easy/manual_v430/1-245.html [utimaco.com]
Re:closed source encryption software??!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And People Wonder Why Open Source! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"Unnamed Customers" (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA, those "unnamed customers" are companies that have the need to remotely reboot their machines. This feature is NOT a backdoor - it merely allows someone WHO ALREADY HAS WRITE ACCESS TO THE ENCRYPED DRIVE (i.e. someone who has already given the passphrase) to grant a one-time certificate that permits a reboot without asking for the passphrase again. The major risk here is that someone will rob your store during the 60 seconds it takes to reboot over the phone, a possible, but highly unlikely scenario.
This is how it works (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a scenario:
1) Install PGP and encrypt the drive.
2) Reboot
3) Turn on the bypass for the next reboot
4) Shutdown
5) Remove the drive and stick it (or copy of the drive) in another computer as a secondary drive
6) Try to access the drive
From your posts, it appears you think you'll see all the files. The simple fact is that you won't. It will appear as an unrecognized volume. That's because the files are still encrypted. The operating system will not be able to access the files. You're screwed.
The whole bootloader is just another step of lockout. First there's bootloader, then there's the windows login. Again, the bootloader is not the thing that "turns off" encryption on the drive after you get past it.
I was already assuming this was how it works because to do it otherwise would be quite foolish. I thought back to the parallels of how Windows works when you turn on encryption for certain files. The delay in most post was because I wanted to check this out with the real product to make sure my assumptions weren't bad. And guess what? I was right. I tried this out in the real world with the real product and the volume was still encrypted even though the bootloader password was bypassed.