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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah-based contractor is working with West Valley City police to decrypt the last hard drive belonging to the late Josh Powell, a person of interest in the 2009 disappearance of his wife, Susan Cox Powell.
Now, they’re looking for assistance in an unlikely place: Amazon.
The contractor, Decipher Forensics, is using a brute force approach to decrypt the hard drive, which Powell encrypted using a software called TrueCrypt. Using brute force means Decipher’s software is running every possible password in an attempt to find the one that will decipher whatever code has made the files on the computer illegible.
Decipher’s computers can test anywhere from 250,000 to 1 billion passwords per second. But even if Decipher knew the password was five lowercase letters, that would still leave nearly 1.5 quintillion possible passwords. And the longer the password, the more possibilities there would be.
After four years of running trillions upon quadrillions of passwords, Decipher believes it was able to get through a “first layer” to reach the encrypted contents of the drive, according to a statement by West Valley City police spokeswoman Roxeanne Vainuku. This does not mean it has decrypted the drive nor was it able to access any information.
Some reports have falsely assumed this breakthrough means Decipher is “halfway through” decrypting the drive, but there is no way of knowing that. The encrypted hard drive is like a box, locked inside another box, locked inside another box. In this case, however, there’s no way of knowing how many boxes there are or whether or not the key really did unlock a relevant box.
TrueCrypt employs several layers of encryption, according to local internet company XMission CEO Pete Ashdown. Layers of encryption are created by encryption algorithms — complicated sets of rules for a computer to follow.
“If they use commonly available, open algorithms, I would really doubt (Decipher’s) potential for success here. The better algorithms … the mathematicians say it would take all the energy in the universe to crack one of those. Nothing’s impossible with enough power and resources when you’re talking about computers, but breaking encryption is pretty close to it,” Ashdown said when he appeared on KSL Newsradio’s "The Doug Wright Show" Thursday.
Enter Amazon.
While Decipher’s computers are built to run billions of passwords a second, they do have a smaller limit than say, Amazon’s servers.
Amazon’s cloud computing software could exponentially speed up the process, but it still wouldn’t be easy.
“It’s not just a matter of waving a magic wand and saying all these computers need to work on it,"Ashdown said. "That’s an enormous undertaking to coordinate all these computers in a parallel fashion to work on this project.
“So it’s not just a matter of Amazon saying, ‘Oh well, we’ve got spare cycles we can dedicate to you, and here you go.’ It would be an enormous human cost in getting this executed. And certainly Amazon has a lot of muscle and money and possibly the resources to do it, but they wouldn’t be making any money off of this either and that’s why they’re in business.”
Ashdown also believes that Amazon — and other companies like it, including Apple — would be worried about setting a precedent. The e-retail giant is not in the business of solving cold cases, he said. Paying for Amazon’s servers instead could cost tens of thousands of dollars or more, depending on how long they took to decipher the drive.
And police aren’t even sure the hard drive will contain any evidence in the case, especially since none of Powell’s other encrypted drives yielded any results.
“Decipher Forensics continues to work on this drive and as technology advances and changes, we continue to explore any new options that might become available to access the contents of this drive,” Vainuku said. “We must, however, make it perfectly clear that this drive, as with other drives we have examined in the past, may hold nothing of evidentiary value. To comment on the potential contents of this drive would be speculative on our part.”
Susan Cox Powell disappeared Dec. 7, 2009, and is presumed dead. Police believe Josh Powell is responsible for her death, though he was never arrested or charged in connection with the case.
Josh Powell killed himself and the couple's two young sons, Charlie and Braden, in February of 2012 while the boys were at his rented home in Graham, Washington, for a supervised custody visit.
During the original search for Susan, police seized multiple computers and external hard drives. Some were taken from Josh and Susan's home in West Valley City. Others were retrieved from his father Steven's home in Puyallup, Washington, where Josh moved after Susan vanished.
Decipher Forensics is working on decrypting the last of these drives.
