phire 8 hours ago

The manufacturer didn’t even know encryption was enabled, because as long as the camera was working, it would just provide all files over USB without any encryption.

It was basically enabled by accident, and the only thing it prevented was recovery of files directly from the SD card when the camera was damaged.

astrange 8 hours ago

There are some reasons you'd want to encrypt even without a secret key. One is it makes it easier to erase data (just erase the key).

It also makes bit flip errors a lot more obvious, which is another way of saying harder to ignore, so that can go either way.

  • ranger_danger 8 hours ago

    Can't bit flip errors also destroy encrypted volumes much more easily?

    • dgoldstein0 5 hours ago

      I think it depends. Encrypted filesystems typically encrypt contents of each file separately - that way you don't need to read / write the whole disk to read it write any individual file contents. Of course that means metadata may be in plain text or may be separately encrypted - again possibly folder by folder instead of all metadata at once. Exact details would vary with different file system encryption schemes.

      Whereas if you image the disk and encrypt the image properly, that gives you all the great confidentially guarantees but no random access.

      • astrange 3 hours ago

        > Encrypted filesystems typically encrypt contents of each file separately - that way you don't need to read / write the whole disk to read it write any individual file contents.

        Ah, that's not true of "full disk encryption". It usually encrypts the disk blocks.

        File-based encryption is stronger; you can use different protection classes on different files, you can use authenticated encryption, etc. iOS does it this way and I assume other systems have caught up, but don't know any in particular.

    • cyphar an hour ago

      Most FDE systems are not authenticated so you would only lose one block (16 bytes for AES). Can this be bad? Yeah, but it's not that bad for data recovery.

anakaine 9 hours ago

Sure. If the card was recovered without the camera motherboard then the decryption key would not have been recovered.

trenchpilgrim 8 hours ago

Stealing a camera is much harder than stealing an SD card out of a camera.

  • Y_Y 8 hours ago

    Citation needed. It might be slightly easier, but most cases where you can get part of the camera, you can get the whole camera. This isn't a little point-and-click with a handy spring-loaded slot either.

    • trenchpilgrim 8 hours ago

      Yeah but the Camera's owner is much more likely to notice "my camera is missing" than "the SD card is blank for some reason... the SD card must have failed"

      EDIT: The linked PDF has a photo, the camera literally opens up to access the SD card.

      • Y_Y 7 hours ago

        The camera's (former) owner may very well notice, but that will have little effect. It's much more common that cameras (security, photography, phones) get stolen with cards inside, rather than someone extracting the card and leaving the camera.

        • trenchpilgrim an hour ago

          This is professional equipment, used for surveys. Think espionage, not consumer hardware.

      • BolexNOLA 7 hours ago

        Worth mentioning that I would immediately know if a different SD card was in my camera the moment I turned it on or ejected the card. If somebody knew to buy the same exact model and storage size that would be truly impressive.