Law Blog 2.0

NIST approved XTS-AES for the secure encryption of block devices in NIST Special Publication 800-38E, Recommendation for Block Cipher Modes of Operation: The XTS-AES Mode for Confidentiality on Block-Oriented Storage Devices (Draft August 2009)(available at http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/BCM/documents/comments/XTS/follow-up_XTS_comments-Ball.pdf) subject to a caveat on the file size. The number of blocks that can be securely encrypted using this method is 2^20 blocks. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm (Rijndael, designed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, published in 1998) that may be used by US federal departments and agencies to cryptographically protect sensitive information. There are various modes of operation some of them are approved by NIST FIPS 140-2. NIST’s decision approves the use of XTS-AES for encrypting block devices (hard drives, optical media, etc.) is particularly significant because TrueCrypt is an open source implementation of [...]