veracrypt-forensic¶

A from-scratch, pure-Rust VeraCrypt / TrueCrypt reader and decryptor — unlock a volume from its password and read the plaintext, plus an anomaly auditor over the recovered volume facts.

Scope

This build brutes the header across all five VeraCrypt PRFs (SHA-512, SHA-256, Whirlpool, Streebog-512, RIPEMD-160) and decrypts both single ciphers (AES-256-XTS, Serpent-256-XTS, Twofish-256-XTS) plus all VeraCrypt cipher cascades (stacked XTS), with a PIM and normal or hidden volumes. See Format Research and Validation.

What it does¶

A VeraCrypt volume stores its master key inside a 512-byte header that is itself encrypted with a key derived from the password. veracrypt-core:

reads the 512-byte volume header (salt[64] + a 448-byte XTS-encrypted header),
derives the header key with PBKDF2-HMAC-<PRF> and tries every PRF × cipher until the decrypted header shows a valid VERA/TRUE magic and both CRC-32s match — so a wrong password/PRF/cipher is rejected with no false positive,
recovers the master key from the decrypted header, and
decrypts the data area as AES-256, Serpent-256, or Twofish-256 XTS — or a cascade of them, applied as stacked XTS layers in cryptsetup key order (the tweak is encrypted_area_start / 512 + LBA) — exposing a plaintext Read + Seek view (read_at).

unlock_hidden_with_password repeats the process against the hidden header at 64 KiB, to access or prove the presence of a deniable hidden volume. veracrypt-forensic grades the recovered facts into observations (legacy TrueCrypt, hidden volume declared, cipher inventory).

The two-crate split¶

Crate	Role	Depends on	Emits
`veracrypt-core`	reader / decryptor	`aes`, `twofish`, `xts-mode`, `pbkdf2`, `sha2`, `whirlpool`, `streebog`, `ripemd`, `crc32fast`, `hmac`, `thiserror`	plaintext view + typed `VolumeInfo`
`veracrypt-forensic`	anomaly analyzer	`veracrypt-core`	graded observations

Trust but verify¶

Every primitive is an audited RustCrypto crate; no cryptography is hand-rolled. Correctness is proven Tier-1 on a real VeraCrypt volume with a published password, where three independent implementations agree byte-for-byte — VeraCrypt 1.26.20, cryptsetup 2.7.0, and this crate. Panic-free, bounds-checked parsing; unwrap/expect denied in production code (#![forbid(unsafe_code)]); fuzzed header parser.