re hard drive security for fbi targets rja cl cam ac uk ross anderson writes in article apr ucsu colorado edu cuffell spot colorado edu tim cuffel writes this suggests a new pc security product design approach first fill the hard drive with random files and files encrypted under a number of known keys then whenever a new secret file is created you delete a random file and replace it with real encrypted data new non secret files are encrypted under a known key better yet instead of thrashing around on the dos file system take it a step further write yourself a minimal file system program that is used to create delete files en decrypt them to ramdisk list a directory put the util password protected on a floppy the catch is that the storage space used by this util is not part of the dos file system instead defrag your disk thus packing all allocated clusters into clusters n then use the back end of the partition to hold your stealth file system or leave a small nd partition on the disk that is not assigned to dos another approach might be to use a directory that contains a set of invariant files dos system files for instance due to dos allocating a minimum storage unit of a cluster there is unused physical space on the disk between the tail end of each file and the end of its associated cluster these dead spaces could be concatenated and used to hold your stealth file system now you have a situation where no encrypted data appears on your disk at all ray berry kb ht ray ole cdac com rjberry eskimo com compuserve com
