Originally Posted by
AngryMiller
Pretty good numbers. If your key phrase is short then that significantly reduces the time it would take to open the encrypted hard drive. Quite often that is the weakest link in encryption. A long phrase is hard to remember but strong. A short phrase is easy to remember but susceptible to brute force cracking. Picking up a foreign novel and taking the first letter of every page and using that as a key would make that pretty secure against brute force attacks.
There have only been a couple hundred million book titles ever published, worldwide. And Google intends to put as many of them as possible on-line, eventually. So the keyspace described by "the Nth character of each page of some book" is eminently vulnerable to brute-force attack in the foreseeably near future. But yes, it's still much better than most pass-phrases out there.
Good crypto is hard and unintuitive. One mistake can trip you up. And a
"rubber hose" attack can defeat even the most technically perfect cryptosystem.
I rather expect that anyone who fails to submissively divulge any requested pass-phrase to the CBP will find themselves on a lifetime "secondary them hard" list; thanks to ubiquitous, secret, unaccountable and unappealable traveler information databases, it's easier than ever for a CBP officer to capriciously and arbitrarily inflict lifelong extrajudicial punishment upon you.
Given that the US has granted its border agents the kind of unaccountable power more typical of a police-state, the only way for an ordinary citizen to truly win the border checkpoint data-privacy battle is by declining the fight; carry no data with you. But you can still win the war by using the Internet to send your encrypted data across borders.