Fooling Experts and Judges – Digital Evidence turns into digital Evil Dance
Eric Filiol
44CON 2024 · Day 3 · Main
In this groundbreaking talk, "Fooling Experts and Judges – Digital Evidence turns into digital Evil Dance," Eric Filiol, a seasoned expert in mathematics, cryptography, and forensic analysis, unveils a novel approach to manipulating digital evidence through what he terms **encryption synthesis**. The presentation challenges the fundamental trust placed in digital evidence within legal systems worldwide, demonstrating how seemingly irrefutable cryptographic proofs can be crafted to present multiple, contradictory realities. Filiol's work, developed since 2021, introduces a new form of **deniable cryptography** that allows a single ciphertext, when decrypted with different short keys, to yield entirely different, yet equally plausible, plaintexts.
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Filiol presents original, working research on single-file deniable cryptography — a problem that was genuinely open — and connects it directly to forensic and legal real-world consequences with live demos. The theoretical contribution is solid, the attack surface is underexplored, and the implications for digital forensics are serious enough that this talk deserves a room.