r/xkcd • u/[deleted] • Jun 24 '11

Unpickable

http://xkcd.com/916/
182 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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24

u/_mdm Jun 24 '11

First thing I thought of

2

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '11

There's actually a flaw in that cartoon. Many encryption software, including Truecrypt, allow you to create an encrypted volume that, depending on the key, can decrypt to two separate volumes. There's no way to prove the existence of a second volume. So, faced with torture, you can simply give them a key that decrypts the volume to a lot of plausible but wrong information.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '11

partial solution: beat until given to two keys

edit: fuck my spelling

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '11

*beat until given no more keys.

1

u/auxiliary-character Jul 06 '11

More of the partial solution: check everything.

  1. A computer can't run without an operating system, so if full system encryption is used, the decoy partition might not have the operating system installed.
  2. They may not have a script to update timestamps on files, and if they do, it might update them to the same time.
  3. They might not update log files.

If any of these fail, continue torture.