* First, that Elephant does not provide meaningful (and certainly not provable) security improvements, and, put in the context of FDE in general, does not give/remove a Bitlocker capability that other mainstream FDE systems actually have.
* Second, that the clunky feature Elephant tries to provide (Ferguson calls it "poor man's authentication") is in fact not at all relevant to the NSA threat model; to wit: if your adversary has an (a) continuous and (b) active vantage point to hit you from, no FDE solution can help you. FDE is exclusively valuable in the case where your disk is irrevocably and totally compromised, despite the folklore that says otherwise.
Popping up a level further on the stack: I'm rebutting the claim that NSA coerced MSFT into removing Elephant. It was a marginal implementation of a marginal countermeasure that wasn't relevant to NSA.
Popping up a level further on the stack: I do not believe that NSA has within the last decade coerced Microsoft into doing anything cryptographic.
> Popping up a level further on the stack: I'm rebutting the claim that NSA coerced MSFT into removing Elephant. It was a marginal implementation of a marginal countermeasure that wasn't relevant to NSA.
Not sure whether this is strong enough evidence to be considered a rebuttal. I do not know and will not claim that it was the NSA (or other) coercing MSFT.
> Popping up a level further on the stack: I do not believe that NSA has within the last decade coerced Microsoft into doing anything cryptographic.
Not the NSA key? Not the removal of end-to-end crypto from Skype and then onboarding of Skype to PRISM? Not the SEA hacking of FBI request documents? Not bitlocker keys automatically uploaded to OneDrive, and OneDrive onboarded to PRISM? Not TPM 2.0 support - not Germany's leak of TPM backdoors - not China's following ban of TPM 2.0 and Windows 8.1 - not Microsoft's then downport of TPM 2.0 support to Windows 8?Not the cloud key escrow patent?
"Once a request comes in from a third party (e.g. a user, a business, a legal entity or governmental entity, etc.) to access user's data, the data storage system may send..."
https://www.google.com/patents/US20120321086
"MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL... went live Dec 2012" - Snowden docs
http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (30)
You probably think Microsoft did these things without NSA/TLA coercion.
I'll repeat it again, for the benefit of the larger HN community (and you can get you jollies downvoting again).
"MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL... went live Dec 2012" - Snowden docs
http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (30)
Microsoft stripped security from newly deployed TLS, worked to undermine TPMs, store copies of your Bitlocker keys for law enforcement, hand cloud data to law enforcement and stripped crypto from Skype.
They either did this all on their own voluntarily, were encouraged or pressured, or where forced. Choose your demon.
These are not controversial views - they are common knowledge among cryptographers.
It is thus an injustice to knock Elephant on 'provability' grounds. The papers for Elephant (and Lion before it) follow standards for peer reviewed work in cryptography.
It is a shame you will not reply to any of the examples in the remainder of the comment.
But other HN readers will see them.
Maybe you could reply to the others.
Where you can no longer reasonably hold your position is where you got off the train.
We might discuss how to best design FDE, or whether FDE is what we want.
But that conversation is orthogonal to the fact that AES-CBC is weaker than AES-CBC + Elephant, which is what we are talking about here.
Your criticism comes down to: "CBC + Elephant may be stronger than CBC, but neither are strong enough for me". I agree with this.