Oh god, I seriously wanted to reply a big fat "WTF?!" to that post. Biggest crock of bullshit I'd ever read. Why the fuck install an entire virtualized operating system inside a multi-encrypted disk image... that shit doesn't even make any sense; just use the same outer encryption library to create another disk image inside the first layer, which itself is, despite the encryption layer residing on the outside,
still encrypting data within a subsequent layer in the same way. Shit just makes me cringe thinking the guy wanted to install multiple OS copies inside multiple layers to produce an illusion of security... it's still protected by a f***ing password. /headdesk
what is this number for exactly? it makes saving the DB slower so i assumed it did a similar thing.
Who knows? The authors apparently don't go out of their way to make it clear, but then again, I don't use keepass... smells a bit too much like
snakeoil.
KeePass user here. Works damn fucking well IMO. Here's how the key transformation thing works, to my understanding:
your master composite key (whatever method you use to authenticate - a password, a file, etc) -> key to encrypt data stored in each data row of login data <-><-> buttfuck using some encryption algorithm -> repeat 100,000+ times to generate completely incomprehensible data.
That happens whenever the DB is changed and saved. And when it's opened, it goes through the reverse mechanism: take a row, un-buttfuck it 100,000 times, and see if it's valid data. If not, bad composite key, try again. If so, buzzah, there's your key. Except that there's no way to break down any one of those 99,999 intermediate steps to see if you got it right without going through each one of the 100,000 iterations for every attempt. So let's amplify your brute-force method by 100,000 times and see how long it takes to crack the fuckin' database, shall we?
I'd say it's pretty effective.
(that's also why it takes about 20 seconds for my phone to load the database (a 55KB database from SD) that takes only about 1 second for my computer to load. 600MHz processor sucks ass.)