Security News > 2022 > February > Bunnie Huang’s Plausibly Deniable Database

Most security schemes facilitate the coercive processes of an attacker because they disclose metadata about the secret data, such as the name and size of encrypted files.

Precursor is a device we designed to keep secrets, such as passwords, wallets, authentication tokens, contacts and text messages.

The PDDB aims to offer users a real option to plausibly deny the existence of secret data on a Precursor device.

If a device is expected to withstand repeated inspections by the same attacker, then the user has to make a choice between performance and deniability.

A "Small" set of secrets can be deniable without a performance impact, but if larger sets of secrets must be kept, then archived data needs to be turned over frequently, to foil ciphertext comparison attacks between disk imaging events.

While a deniable database or file system allows the person to plausibly say that there are no more keys to beat out of them, the perpetrators can never be sure.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/bunnie-huangs-plausibly-deniable-database.html