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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Don't ever trust anyone to keep your sensitive data encrypted by default. Make sure you get something like TrueCrypt (open source, tested by a large segment of population, security experts from open source segment, etc) that is truly secured and don't have any backdoors, and use that to lock-up your data in a encrypted container. Make backups in cloud of those containers and sleep like a baby.

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Uhhh... what about when I take a photo with my Android phone?

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't believe it's secure to use TrueCrypt anymore, and I didn't even think it was possible to use a volume on Android, let alone an automatically encrypted volume.

I'm worried about thugs blackmailing me, not state actors.

Don't have cloud enabled and sharing by default. Also use strip tags software to erase your geolocations from the pictures you take. And if take sensitive pictures (children in your house, sexy time with SO, police doing a crime, etc) definitely move them to an encrypted container and use a wiper too to get rid of them from your normal storage.

And yeah, I used the TrueCrypt as an example because is the most recognizable name in this, but in my particular setup I use VeraCrypt, as pointed by someone else. Wasn't aware that VeraCrypt got so popular. Before VeraCrypt I used Jetico Bestcrypt containers but those weren't public source.

To chime in on TrueCrypt, and perhaps someone can help elaborate, I understood that it went offline and the maintainer called quits suspiciously? VeraCrypt was the successor iirc.

TrueCrypt is long gone: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/true-goodbye-using-truec...

The idea that it's safer to trust Truecrypt than the platform's enclave secret system because enclaves sometimes have vulnerabilities strikes me as pretty weird, since the big difference between Truecrypt and an enclave-based system is that Truecrypt doesn't have an enclave to begin with.

Doesn't seem that weird. The enclave has your secret in it, and comes attached to the storage it's protecting. Steal storage, extract key, done.

My software FDE does not keep my password in it. There is nothing to extract after stealing. I will happily stipulate though that this requires a solid password and key stretching.

... if and only if it is off. Which is probably not a great assumption with a phone.

A DIY mitigation might be to convert a phone to having only an external battery on a long cable, which stays in your other pocket.

Philosophically I do agree with where you're coming from with contemporary devices insisting on baking in privileged keys. It's unfortunate that we're forced to choose between the two models.

Good point. Didn't really consider live or "cold boot" attacks.

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