[DarkKnight]

Do the Feds know something we don't about crypto-tool? Or did bloke squeal his password?

Discontinued on-the-fly disk encryption utility TrueCrypt was unable to keep out the FBI in the case of a US government techie who stole copies of classified military documents. How the Feds broke into the IT bod's encrypted TrueCrypt partition isn't clear.

It raises questions about the somewhat sinister situation surrounding the software team's sudden decision to stop working on the popular project last May.

US Air Force sysadmin Christopher Glenn was sent down for 10 years after stealing military documents relating to the Middle East, in addition to copying emails controlled by the commander of a special unit that conducts military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as we reported.

Glenn, 34, had secret-level clearance, and worked at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras installing and maintaining Windows 7 systems when he swiped copies of the classified files. He was arrested, charged, and appeared before a court in the southern district of Florida, where he admitted breaking the US Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced on Friday.

According to the Sun Sentinel, the court heard a claim by Gerald Parsons, an army counterintelligence expert, that the FBI had managed to access a concealed and encrypted hard-drive partition within which Glenn had hidden the stolen files.

The hidden compartment was protected using "a complex 30-character password," Parsons said. It would take the Feds millions of years to crack it by brute force. A summary of Parsons' testimony is here [PDF].

The court heard that the partition was created using TrueCrypt, a popular source-is-available encryption tool, developed from 2004 up until last year when its anonymous developers mysteriously closed the project down.

The TrueCrypt team's decision to cease maintenance of the project made headlines in the tech world when its website was replaced with a warning against continued use of the software, with little to no explanation of why.

An audit of TrueCrypt, which began before the project imploded, was unable to offer additional information as to why it had been discontinued. Instead, the team of expert security researchers who had carried out the audit declared that they had found no evidence of any deliberate backdoors or serious design flaws in its code.

Canary warning from TrueCrypt may have been real after all.
Source

[Dismas]

Makes me curious. I wonder what algorithm he used.

[DarkKnight]

Makes me curious. I wonder what algorithm he used.

Most likely, the FBI must have used a keylogger because how could they have cracked a "complex 30-character password?".

[mothered]

It's still somewhat sketchy.

Did the Feds access the encrypted HDD (containing the files), or did they obtain them via other means? The media tells you only what they want you to hear. Unless proven, It's all hearsay to me.

[Jolly]

Well, brute forcing such a passwords surely is impossible, even if it were possible, I'd doubt it would be the FBI doing that, it is something one would expect from the NSA. There are many security vulnerabilities making the password accessable, considering human errors. 30-Character special password seems something really hard to remember on their own so maybe he wrote it down somewhere (Which doesn't really make sense considering warrants and search orders are a thing) or maybe they used a key-logger of some sort.

Doesn't really amount to anything important, although I am a bit curious how a simple Win7 maintenance tech was able to fetch secret military documents so willy-nilly. What was he planning to do with them anyway?