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FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

rietta.com

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Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#151
Let's imagine they succeed. So all strong encryption will need to have the keys stored "safely" somewhere. Perhaps at some government-controlled server, because we all know they are super secure.

So, what happens once the keys eventually leak? When nation states AND terrorist organizations get the keys to unlock everyone's encryption?

If "think of terrorists" is the rhetoric here, what happens when THEY have access to our devices?

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not completely true. If bad guys didn't have guns, we'd still want good guys to have them. I don't want police having to take on a guy with knives and a baseball bat, themselves only armed with knives and a baseball bat.

Why not? It works. Cops without guns: https://youtu.be/cX5CPx4RKWw Cop with gun: https://youtu.be/RdoeBXt06Bc

Those cops were very brave, but you're going to be hard pressed to find even a tiny minority of Americans willing to put cop lives in that kind of danger.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#153
If the FBI gets its way on this, quite simply the US will no longer deserve the technology industry it currently has.

I for one would follow companies moving abroad to do the right thing and avoid these shenanigans entirely.

On top of it being the right thing, it is also in Apple's economic interest to fight this since the US is but one market. They also happen to have enough cash to flat out threaten to move all affected products out of the US and have them built by a non-American subsidiary.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#154
post #11

In the future, the few years following Snowden's revealations may be viewed as the golden years of strong cryptography: A time when service providers and application developers began taking these issues seriously. We're moving into a new era now. All it may take is a single attack in the US to drive the legislative and judicial branches to roll back all the fantastic improvements we've seen over the past few years.

They can "roll back" for mass marketed products but not for some simple, open source software in standard C that someone runs on an old PC with PC/DOS, no hard disk and no network connection. So, when turn the power off, the PC forgets everything about the de/encryption. The only non-volatile storage is on diskette. If worried, then just burn those. With the encryption done, the output is just a base 64 file of gibbe…

And then they will outlaw the possession of said standard C software, as well as of computer hardware that does not comply with government-mandated eavesdropping. And then they will pass laws that force you to give up the encryption key to that Base64 data or face imprisonment. Even if the Base64 data is just a sequence of completely random bits - because who would keep sequences of random bits around, unless they're a terrorist trying to hide something?

I'm sorry, but I don't think pushing encryption down into the underworld is a viable solution to the problem. There's no limit to the bad laws that the government can pass. The only real long-term solution is to recognize encryption as a right, otherwise we'll only keep seeing these repeated attempts to outlaw it.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#155
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control. Of course not. Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. >And yet, there are many people living in rent-contr…

> Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. I'd love to hear the argument for this. Again, many people living in rent-controlled houses would disagree. Just because people are poor you…

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

>Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#156
Nothing stops anyone from developing software that can be installed on mobile phones to encrypt this or that. This will be a type of Cold War between those with something to protect and those who want everything transparent.

I will choose to encrypt outside of what they OS does and to hell with every other idea.

Besides, all one has to do is encrypt, use one-time pads and keys are largely irrelevant.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#157
Many people want gun laws to change. For better or worse there will still be millions of guns on the street. So if you don't want "bad guys" to use guns or encryption it would be pretty impractical to go back in time and prevent these technological & regulatory forces that provided the means for them to exist,

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#158
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. I'd love to hear the argument for this. Again, many people living in rent-controlled houses would disagree. Just because people are poor you…

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html >Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”

Ok, so economists agree that "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available". Thankfully, economists don't run our country. How does this support the statement "Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones."? Quantity and quality of housing are arguably much less important than ensuring there is a viable working class—just see how terrible a place SF or Manhattan is to live.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#160
Schenier, Hal Abelson, Adelman (from RSA) already wrote about key escrow almost 2 decades ago. From the text:

> All key-recovery systems require the existence of a highly sensitive and highly-available secret key or collection of keys that must be maintained in a secure manner over an extended time period. These systems must make decryption information quickly accessible to law enforcement agencies without notice to the key owners. These basic requirements make the problem of general key recovery difficult and expensive -- and potentially too insecure and too costly for many applications and many users.

> Attempts to force the widespread adoption of key-recovery encryption through export controls, import or domestic use regulations, or international standards should be considered in light of these factors. The public must carefully consider the costs and benefits of embracing government-access key recovery before imposing the new security risks and spending the huge investment required (potentially many billions of dollars, in direct and indirect costs) to deploy a global key recovery infrastructure.

https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/archives/1997/04/the_r...

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