Analysis of Storage Security (Re: preventing information leakage in gbde protected system)

[Allan Fields]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 09:37:41PM +0100, David Kreil wrote:
> 
> Dear Allan,
> 
> After a job induced pause in my strong interest in encryption solutions, I'm 
> now slowly returning to the case. You have kindly provided good advice when we 
> were in touch last year and I was wondering whether you had any further 
> information regarding setting up a system to be gbde protected early enough 
> during system boot to avoid leakage of sensitive information in /var, /etc, 
> and possible the root (/).

Many thanks for your patience..

pjd has some patches that can allow encrypted root to be mounted
at boot.  I'd recommend trying them out. The biggest argument for
full disk encryption is to say that you've eliminated at the base
system level the ability for raw data leakage to disk.

It's clear I should dedicate a few days doing GBDE/GELI stuff.

Sorry I've not spent the time necessary as of yet.
My publishing situation is slightly unordered, with time that will
improve and my analysis _will_ find it's way online.

I was thinking I could pursue: simple text/HTML pages, O'Reilly
article, or conference papers in the future, but I want to make
sure I have a verifiably strong analysis, though general tutorials
might be what people need..


I'm actually working on multiple fronts investigating device-level
and vnode-level solutions.  There are various tools available under
*BSD, Linux, Windows.  I hope to post an extended inventory of the
area, but if I don't get around to that, I'll be sure to post a
brief on the current state of GBDE,GELI (GEOM based) solutions under
FreeBSD.  If someone beats me to it, I'll try to contribute anything
additional that I've found.

There is also someone from Max-Plank Institute in Germany who is
waiting on analysis of these solutions.  I'm OK with doing some
analysis and making that available free, I just expanded the scope
of the solution space I'm investigating.

If someone wants to fund development,  I don't know what the GEOM 
authors opinion on this would be.  You might check out Himeji Systems
(http://himejisystems.com) which is my startup.  I hope to formalize
a security offering based on Open Source solutions and work with
other vendors who are interested in Storage Security.  Again, mostly
bare bones pages.

Under Linux, IBM Research based out of Austin, Texas is working on
eCryptFS.

Under Windows Sarah Dean has been doing work on an Open Source OTFE
implementation.  Most of these efforts are part-time and have gone
w/o formal review or analysis (that is publicly available).

Additionally there are a number of commercial solutions that work
into the SAN/NAS picture.  I think both FreeBSD and Linux has the
potential to compete in this space given iSCSI like arrangements.
Has anyone had success with ggate and gbde in this type of
configuration?

Thanks,
   Allan


> With many thanks
> and best regards,
> 
> David.
> 
> > > > > I wonder, in particular, what issues I have to expect in wanting to keep
> > > > > system relevant directories like /var on a gdbe partition.
> > > >
> > > > The gbde attach should occur early enough during multiuser startup to avoid
> > > > such problems, I don't recall if the provided rc script would be sufficient,
> > > > I'll test a configuration soon, or let me know if you have any luck.
> > 
> > I plan to elaborate further on the subject and will post more details
> > to the lists.  I can try to collect some practical examples, as I
> > originally set out to do earlier this summer, and put up a web page.
> > 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr David Philip Kreil               
> Research Fellow, Darwin College,  | WWTF Vienna Science Chair of
> University of Cambridge		  | Bioinformatics, Dept of Biotechnology,
> ++44 1223 764107, fax 7092 810040 | c/o IAM / BOKU, A-1190 Muthgasse 18
> www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dpk20 | ++43 1 360066830

--
Allan Fields (afields)		- Ottawa, Canada (45"10'N 75"56'W)
 Himeji Systems			http://himejisystems.com
 Afields Research/AFRSL		http://afields.ca

 2D4F 6806 D307 0889 6125  C31D F745 0D72 39B4 5541

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/attachments/20050801/ddb2e3a6/attachment.bin