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October 18

What happens when you encrypt a blank disk?

I'm quite familiar with AES, or I thought I was. It makes perfect sense to me when you are reading and writing data, or transmitting and receiving data.. But yesterday I encrypted a 500GB USB disk, and it took 6 hours to "encrypt". What's so strange about that you might ask? Well, I had just formatted it and it was completely blank. According to DiskCryptor I can now read and write data "normally" to this disk and it will be encrypted and if I unmount it, i can't mount it without my password, that's exactly what I want. But what took 6 hours? I understand all the previous data is basically still there after a quick format, is it just encrypting that? But that to me would seem silly, at least not to give an option, surely it would be just as effective to zero it out and that wouldn't take 6 hours? I can't find a relevant result in google, it's all drowned out by articles about encryption which all say the same thing: take the data, do some magic, and *pooof* it's encrypted, but I suspect there's something else going on here too... Vespine (talk) 04:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just going to take a wild guess here, as I'm not familiar with DiskCryptor per se. But it seems likely that it creates a blank filesystem of a fixed size, encrypted with your passphrase and a random initialization vector. The advantage of this over zeroing it out is that, this way, an opponent can't tell anything about the contents of the filesystem, including whether it's empty (though the opponent could probably figure out the filesystem's capacity). Then when you start actually storing stuff there, it should be fast, and again, an opponent won't be able to recover any of the metadata; it will all just look like white noise without the key. --Trovatore (talk) 07:32, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I think you're right, I just saw an article about bit locker that says it writes random encrypted data on almost all the free space during the "initialise" step. I'm confident DiskCryptor would be doing the same thing, for exactly the reasons you suggest. Vespine (talk) 09:34, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

When a page is marked resolved as it is here, who makes this determination? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.167.205.171 (talk) 01:11, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In general, anyone can. In this particular case, looking through the Computing Reference Desk history shows that it was marked by Vespine (the Original Poster, or OP, who first asked the question) as part of their same edit which started "Yes I think you're right,". For more details on the use of the template, see Template:Resolved. -- ToE 15:03, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

how we can protect our country ?

--Ramyavishnu (talk) 06:23, 18 October 2016 (UTC) now a days terroesit attacking our country by the unknown way so how we can protect our country ?[reply]

Hello. I've taken the liberty of creating a new section for you. The wikipedia Reference desks are special pages, when you wish to ask a question, please use the big blue button at the top of the page, don't "edit" the whole page as it can mess up the formatting. To address your question, it's very broad and general, the more broad and general your question is, the more broad and general the answers will be. Try our article on counter terrorism to start with. Lastly this is the ~~Science reference desk for science related questions~~(the below poster is of course correct, this is the computing ref desk, pardon my brain hiccup) if your question is more about politics, policies regarding terrorism, law, history, society etc.. Probably the Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities might be more appropriate. Vespine (talk) 07:15, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, this is the Computing reference desk, not Science. If you're talking about computer attacks, you might start with computer security. That's a very big topic all by itself.

Also, it might be helpful if you might told us what country you mean by "our country". --69.159.61.230 (talk) 08:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging the editor so that he sees there are answers: hello, Ramyavishnu. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 10:35, 18 October 2016 (UTC) [reply]

The best way to protext our country from IT attack is to shutdown the entire internet. 100% fool proof solution. No attacks guarantied. 175.45.116.99 (talk) 06:04, 20 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, 100% fool proof solution, no attack guaranteed. Because before the internet the was no malware of any sort. I don't remember den zuk [1] on computers before I first used the internet in 1996. And that's why people needing secure systems just make sure there is no internet connection and don't worry about people plugging in USB keys and Stuxnet (which admitedly did use the internet sometimes) never happened, etc .... Nil Einne (talk) 07:13, 20 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

inline search in android six

how to get it back. jellybean device free basics has it but not marshmallow free basics — Preceding unsigned comment added by Minimobiler (talk • contribs) 18:53, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Are you talking about Free Basics? Our article claims that Bing Search should be there. You may have to change your default search engine from google, which is not in the free mix.Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:13, 19 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

inline text search is not web search, Graeme Bartlett. searching within a text, not web.Minimobiler (talk) 08:19, 19 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I will leave this for someone that actually knows something. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:41, 19 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]