Romex Software Forum

Pardon a question that I suppose should be answered somewhere already, but I took some time searching without a directly related result.

I'm simply wondering about when you for instance use an SSD partition for Primocache to speed up a mechanical drive, how readable is the cached data by some third party tool looking just at the contents of the cache partition itself? If it is fairly readable with the right tools, would there be some way to incorporate some light encryption scheme to the cache partition? Some relatively light encryption would go a long way compared to none.

Thanks.

Hi,

Because PrimoCache is a block-level caching program, content stored in the cache is also organized in blocks. No file system information is stored and usually a file is cached in non-continous blocks, besides usually only some fragments of a file instead of the whole file are stored, so it is quite difficult to "read" out the content.

Thanks for the reply!

I did a test using a fairly competent recovery program and yes it takes quite a bit of work putting pieces together, however it's just a matter of effort and how much of the files have been cached. Users should note that at least partial file contents as well as file structures, names and such is all plainly readable if it has entered the cache partition. It would be nice to see a future option for some additional scrambling or some encryption scheme, just to have it available even at the natural cost of performance.

Otherwise I very much like the software.

How readable are the datas on your cached drive?...
If you don't encrypt it, why do you want to encrypt the cache?

But when you encrypt a partition and then cache it with PrimoCache (L2), is the data encrypted on the cache volume too?

piquadrat wrote:But when you encrypt a partition and then cache it with PrimoCache (L2), is the data encrypted on the cache volume too?

I would have run a test on that too even if it wasn't a part of my initial concern, but Primocache 1.01 was unable to recognise TrueCrypt volumes on my system.

Mouse wrote:

piquadrat wrote:But when you encrypt a partition and then cache it with PrimoCache (L2), is the data encrypted on the cache volume too?

I would have run a test on that too even if it wasn't a part of my initial concern, but Primocache 1.01 was unable to recognise TrueCrypt volumes on my system.

Use encrypted file container on unencrypted partition and then cache that partition.

Same configuration as piquadrat; works great. As for security once someone has physical access or compromised the OS environment with privileged access all bets are off. There are many other points of vulnerability that would seem more appealing. That said, if you are using L2 to cache highly sensitive data then you may want to consider a drive with integrated security to harden against off line attacks (eg: installing the cache drive into another machine).