Europol’s Cybercrime Agency Has Had Some Problems With Truecrypt

In recent months, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have lamented about the proliferation of strong, easy to use hard drive encryption, particularly in mainstream consumer products such as the iPhone.

Even though those fears are largely exaggerated, it appears that the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Europol's cybercrime agency, has encountered some obstacles when it comes to the use of popular encryption tool, Truecrypt, according to an internal document obtained by Motherboard.

Marked as for "Law Enforcement Only," the document lays out a case where investigators had seized the laptop of a suspect, and had also obtained the password but were unable to gain access to the machine.

"After booting the forensic copy however, the error message 'Missing operating system' appeared, leading them to believe there was a fundamental problem with the laptop," the document reads.

There wasn't anything wrong with the computer, however. Instead, the suspect had apparently loaded it with Truecrypt, a piece of software used for hard drive encryption. This prevents a third party with physical possession of the device from accessing files on the system.

On top of this, the suspect had allegedly configured Truecrypt to trigger a phony startup message once the computer was booted.

"The password simply had to be inserted on the black screen displaying the error message," the document continues. "The sole purpose of this message was to fool law enforcement."

Truecrypt has been held in high regard by security experts over the years. The Truecrypt project is no longer officially maintained, however. In May last year, its anonymous developers announced they would be stopping service of the programme. Nevertheless, Truecrypt was successfully audited for vulnerabilities in April 2015, and overall it's a very solid piece of software. Alternatives have since popped up too, as continuing to use a privacy tool that does not receive updates is generally ill-advised.

Although in this case, investigators obtained the necessary password to unlock the device anway, today, with Apple and Google pushing more powerful encryption onto their products, the intense debate around security, privacy, and law enforcement will continue.