Somewhat OT, encryption question

jd1008 jd1008 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 26 18:26:08 UTC 2014


That is quite easy.

Get a small thumb drive which are now almost free.
Put on it some random data (be sure that data is not
also on your HD).
So, when you encrypt, you incorporate that data into
the encrypted file(s), then remove the thumb drive.


On 11/26/2014 10:39 AM, Bill Oliver wrote:
>
> I was thinking about the infamous "code purple error" for HP 
> computers, where Windows is keyed to the hardware of the machine. If 
> you swap out a hard drive or change a card, it won't boot. Apparently, 
> there is a "tattoo" of various hardware identifiers in static memory 
> somewhere and the OS matches a code put in during installation with 
> that number.
>
> For the HP issue, the fix is easy -- you just delete the command to 
> check during boot up.  But, I was thinking about this as an encryption 
> option -- where one could encrypt files in a way that automatically 
> incorporates hardware information with the passphrase.  That way, if 
> someone were to intercept a file and knew your passphrase, they would 
> still not be able to decrypt the file unless they did it on one 
> specific machine.
>
> Is there anything like that for fedora?  It would probably be pretty 
> easy to hack the gpg source code to add a few lines to append system 
> information to the passphrase, but if there's something already 
> around, I'd like to play with it...
>
> billo



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