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Comment by taybin | Hacker News Reader

The hidden encrypted partition might make things worse for everyone: https://defuse.ca/truecrypt-plausible-deniability-useless-by...

They'll just keep hitting you with the wrench until you give them the second password. Sucks if you don't actually have a second encrypted partition.

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Does Truecrypt have the capability to provide a password that ruins the secret? You could give your tormentors a password that once used deletes or makes the protected content permanently inaccessible and yeah they'll still beat you to death, but now they can never have what they wanted from you.

If it had, the tormentors would just back up the drive before attempting to access the data.

Good point, that would totally circumvent this, and a read-only system would too.

No, only if they then put a load of files into the opened partition. Which would be stupid.

You can't have this sort of thing because it is easily circumvented by opening the encrypted volume on a read-only disk.

While such a scheme would be possible using quantum cryptography, it is not possible with truecrypt, no.

Or alternately, unencrypts only portions of the drive leaving the rest hidden.

I don't think that's possible.

Contrary to the downvote and claim of implausibility, steganography does exactly that. A partition could easily contain extraneous data which could be used to hide and encrypt a message.

What they neglect to consider is that for the vast majority of truecrypt users, the government will not investigate their computer at all. In this case, it is a better strategy not to use a hidden volume, since it is more work. And most people will always choose the easy way.

Actually, even if you don't want to use a hidden volume, according to game theory the correct solution is for the user to always have a second volume and for law enforcement to continue torturing the user until they divulge their second volume (or die)

I haven't used Truecrypt, but couldn't you create a hidden volume within the hidden volume within the hidden volume?

Truecrypt is limited to one hidden volume, but maybe there's other software that can do more.

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