I Built Phantomdrive, a Secure USB That Hides Its Own Vault
My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
I created Phantomdrive, an open-source USB device that appears as a standard 8 GB drive but hides a second, AES-256 encrypted volume. By using a CH569 chip and a unique password trigger, the device remains undetectable to operating systems until unlocked. This design aims to protect users from authoritarian regimes and corrupt police who might force media decryption, ensuring your data stays safe even if the device is seized.
With Phantomdrive, hopefully you'll slip past authoritarian government representatives, corrupt police, and anyone else that doesn't respect basic encryption rights.
- tptacek
If you're using off-the-shelf "hidden" encrypted volume schemes, you're not going to be evading state-level adversaries; if you can find these projects and conveniently use them, state vendors can and will write scanners that find them. They're paid to do it; new detections are how they get to charge for maintenance and new versions.
Then you're down to two issues:
(1) Concealing an encrypted volume jacks suspicion way up; whatever pickle you were going to be in if you just kept an encrypted DMG on your desktop, you're trebly in now.
(2) Your actual security comes down to the strength of the encrypted volume, and this is 20-year-old encryption. He can't use a memory-hard KDF because of his BOM, which, like, fair enough, but that doesn't change the fact that this KDF is probably ~50x faster than standard bcrypt hardness and on realistic human passwords is probably crackable in minutes-to-hours on a dedicated rig.
I winced particularly at the observation that the hardness was set where it is because of how long it takes to open the encrypted volume on this hardware, because whatever scheme is being used to run the KDF now, an attacker won't bother; they'll just copy the bits and attack them on serious hardware.
Point (1) isn't meaningful if your adversaries aren't states. It might make sense to have a hidden encrypted volume for the same reason you'd want an encrypted safe. But point (2) applies to everybody.
- rsingel
Just chiming in that there are lots of threats that aren't state level attackers. In fact for most people the threat is never gonna be the border guard. It's your parents, an abusive partner, a sibling, a school admin or an employer.
Just because something does work vs the NSA or the FBI, that doesn't make it useless
- tlhunter
I want something like this in a keyboard: a completely hidden drive that the OS cannot see until I type in a certain string of characters (password) to activate it with a separate string of characters to deactivate it.
- imglorp
It might make more sense to embed the encrypted volume in some generic USB device. Require some condition to be true before the volume appears to the host, otherwise it's doing power or camera stuff.
A drive would draw more scrutiny than a camera or powerbank or even a cable. https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
- matheusmoreira
Plausible deniability requires people to believe that you don't know about any so called "hidden" volumes. That goes out the window once you buy Hidden Drive from Hidden Drive Company.
- Retr0id
There are other issues with AES-CTR - an attacker can flip bits at chosen offsets in the plaintext without knowing the key. For example, if they know (or can guess/infer) what offset the relevant portion of the `sudo` binary is at, they could flip the branch instruction responsible for password checking. This can be done in one step, as opposed to the multi-step plaintext recovery attack described in the article.
With XTS, the attacker is forced to completely garble a whole block at a time.
- Schlagbohrer
> "Many places don’t respect privacy laws, in certain situations you may be forced to unencrypt your media, or worse, assumed to be guilty. A Veracrypt hidden volume is useful in the former situation, but not the latter.
This is why I made Phantomdrive."
Can someone explain to me how this project is different than a Veracrypt hidden volume and also what he means that Veracrypt wouldn't help if you are assumed to be guilty? I thought Veracrypt hidden volumes aren't visible.
- tim-projects
Reading this made me think that a good solution would be to write your own filesystem as a mod if an existing system. It just needs to differ enough from existing recognised systems. Then nobody would be able to read except you and the encrypted data effectively doesn't exist. It just would show up as an unreadible partition.