Home Office question on wiped rather than encrypted data.

[Adam Atkinson]

On 31-Mar-00 08:47:59, Roland Perry said:

>It does this already. In what circumstances could a policeman claim that
>a not-file consisting entirely of E5's was 'protected information'?

That's easy! You could have chosen the _size_ of the not-file in such
a way as to communicate a limited amount of information.

So the E5's themselves don't communicate information, but how many
there are does.

Could the police ask me to explain the significance of my partition
sizes, the sizes of any swap files I might have, etc?

Indeed, the sizes of _any_ of my documents could encode information.
As indeed could their modification times, etc. Hmm.

Yet another "How do I prove my innocence?" scenario, or am I just
being silly? I don't think I'm being SO silly. Assuming something like
RIP passes, and I want to try and mock it, this is exactly the sort of
thing I would do. (Of course, now that I've said this on uk-crypto,
that's MY alibi shot to hell!)

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
Eschew obfuscation!