[ale] little math

[Scott Castaline]

On 02/12/2010 11:31 PM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 23:28, Jim Popovitch<jimpop at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 22:56, Brian Pitts<brian at polibyte.com>  wrote:
>>> > From the OP:
>>>
>>>> I'm just going by people recommendations in setting up a LUKS volume.
>>>> They all agree to do the urandom data will produce a stronger means of
>>>> encryption as opposed to all zeros, which is the last data pattern
>>>> written in the badblocks utility.
>>
>> OK, the LUKS people make sense... but where does it say that repeating
>> urandom data every so often is a security concern or that having 100%
>> random data on the whole disk is a security enhancement?    Again, my
>> whole point is that duplicity of random data is no less week than no
>> having duplicity of random data.   The assumption that one will be
>> able to tell the random data from real data hasn't been proven beyond
>> assumption.
>
> Oh, and if they do prove that being able to tell the random data from
> real data can be determined, show me the LUKS vulnerability.
>
> -Jim P.
>
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Ok, how about this, create a file of random data about 25% of the drive. 
Now take this file and cut it in half, append the 1st part to the second 
part creating a 2nd file 25% of the drive. For the 3rd quarter read the 
1st file backwards (LIFO). Now take this file and repeat the steps for 
creating the 2nd file. Append file 1, file 2, file 3, and file 4. Create 
an iso out of that for the drive, then dd if=mashedupfile of=/dev/sd?. I 
don't know if that would save anytime, but might be interesting. Of 
course you obviously need a lot of drive space if this for a 1TB drive.