Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

Posted May 16, 2011 12:51 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
In reply to: Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android by RogerOdle
Parent article: Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

> Encryption works worst when the contents contain repetitive patterns as you may find in media files that contain frames of data.

If the encryption system you are using is vulnerable to known plaintext or repetitive patterns, it is not a good encryption system.

Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

Posted May 16, 2011 18:31 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

not to mention the fact that almost all media files are compressed, specifically to remove the repetitive patterns.

and most encryption software compresses the data to be encrypted as well

Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

Posted May 24, 2011 12:10 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

I think RogerOdle was referring to the framing given by the container format, which has high regularity. Of course this applies as well to your soopersekrit.odt office document. Known plaintext is a fact of life, even choosen plaintext attacks are to be expected in this context.

Full-disk encryption does not usually compress.

Encrypting only "valuable" data is not a good solution IMO.