Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 238 posts

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#121

Post by saas_co_de »

bradknowles wrote: post #75
unabst wrote: post #65

The argument here is extremely simple. Encryption is the only way to secure information. This is true for criminals and non-criminals alike. To deny encryption is to deny security to everyone. Presuming it's the criminals who will look to exploit these vulnerabilities, denying security is making every non-criminal susceptible to attack. So the only question that needs to be answered is this. Do we want to protect our…

But how do you design a strong encryption algorithm that can be trivially unlocked once a warrant is provided? Answer: you can’t.

> Answer: you can’t.

No, it is incredibly simple. You have a master key and the government holds this key on a secure audited system which can only be used to unlock a device once a court order is granted.

The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least.

You would also make the master keys expire regularly (maybe daily) so as long as a user updates their phone they will get updated with the new keys to protect against a leaked key.

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#122

Post by dx034 »

molszanski wrote: post #91
bo1024 wrote: post #41

It's hard to know where to even begin in arguing against this. There's the freedom/privacy argument, but I guess this is debatable depending on if you view computer files as an extension of your ideas/knowledge, or an extension of your physical possessions. Someone brought up the entire "risk of overreach and abuse" argument. There's also the likelihood of any tools the government has being leaked and used by bad act…

Consider these two points as a start: - They solved crimes before iPhones. Encryption is not a roadblock - In many countries guns are illegal. Yet criminals do own them. If encryption becomes illegal, criminals would still use it

> - In many countries guns are illegal. Yet criminals do own them. If encryption becomes illegal, criminals would still use it

The main reason why recent terror attacks in Europe used trucks and knives was because guns are really hard to buy in most countries. Even on the black market it'll be hard to get guns in many European countries. Not saying that there's no black market but most people wouldn't have the contacts to get any. So outlawing helps a lot and while it doesn't reduce gun crime by 100%, it probably reduces it by >90%.

While encryption is easier to get online (no physical shipping), I doubt many people have the knowledge to identify good encryption without backdoors. Most would probably fall for mechanisms planted by intelligence services.

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#123

Post by dx034 »

olliej wrote: post #5

I wish this could be hammered into the thick heads of congress: there is secure, and there is insecure. There is not a gradient.

Sorry but that's not true. Using a short pass code for your phone is not secure but it's more secure than using none at all. There are many shades for security and not everything that's unbreakable is the same as no security. The same as old and simple locks are not secure but better than no locks at all.

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#124

Post by cesarb »

zodiac wrote: post #66
brian-armstrong wrote: post #45

Here's my biggest complaint with this debate - people are confusing literal with metaphorical. They make the analogy of the unbreakable safe. Encryption isn't that. You can still recover the physical phone and all of the storage chips on it. That the patterns of bits in the chips make up some unrecognizable utterance is seemingly immaterial. I could write gibberish in my journal at home if I wanted to, and I think we…

But it does make sense as an analogy? In this case the contents of the safe correspond to the plaintext, the key that opens the safe is the private key, and having the safe without the key is like having the ciphertext without the private key

It doesn't because a safe is just a wrapper for its contents, which are within the safe still in their original form, while with cryptography the contents no longer exist in their original form. A safe would be a good analogy for instance for a tamper-proof USB stick which required a password to make its contents visible to the operating system, but which stored its data unencrypted.

A better analogy for cryptography is "a journal written in code". This better captures the property of encrypted data: the contents of the journal corresponds to the plaintext, the rules to encode the writings corresponds to the cipher plus the private key, and having the journal without the rules is like having the ciphertext without the private key. Like with cryptography but unlike with a safe, to get to the contents you have to know or guess the rules; you can't drill the door like you can with a safe.

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#125

Post by dx034 »

Dowwie wrote: post #116

The moment that the US government stops complaining about encryption is when you will know that it has found a way through it.

That would be too transparent. Also, if they really crack popular encryption, only few people will know to avoid any leaks. Maybe they'd complain even more to give people the feeling that they cannot crack that particular method.

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#126

Post by ditn »

saas_co_de wrote: post #121
bradknowles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you design a strong encryption algorithm that can be trivially unlocked once a warrant is provided? Answer: you can’t.

> Answer: you can’t. No, it is incredibly simple. You have a master key and the government holds this key on a secure audited system which can only be used to unlock a device once a court order is granted. The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least. You would also make the maste…

"incredibly simple"

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#127

Post by dx034 »

belorn wrote: post #106
rubyfan wrote: post #4

What did the police do before there was the internet or phones?

In my nation, and as I hear in many other places, the police force was much more decentralized in the past. You had local police handling problems at the local level using local knowledge. As I hear/read it was a bit more costly, had the occasional problem of local corruption, quality had a bit more variance, organized crime was a bigger problem, but the average crime had better results and was done quicker. There wa…

That's also because criminals needed local knowledge. If I wanted to commit a crime today in another city, I can get there easily and quickly and get all the info I need online. In the past, small cities would've noticed strangers but (luckily) you can walk through other cities nowadays without people objecting that. For the police that means that they need to follow criminals and be able to share information nationally and internationally.

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#128

Post by upofadown »

Spivak wrote: post #53
brian-armstrong wrote: post #45

Here's my biggest complaint with this debate - people are confusing literal with metaphorical. They make the analogy of the unbreakable safe. Encryption isn't that. You can still recover the physical phone and all of the storage chips on it. That the patterns of bits in the chips make up some unrecognizable utterance is seemingly immaterial. I could write gibberish in my journal at home if I wanted to, and I think we…

The other side of this is that enshrining encryption as something that police can't compel you to help with just creates a huge loophole for hiding incriminating documents. You can go to jail for destroying evidence, why would encrypting the data and refusing to provide the password or deleting the key be any different?

But can you go to jail for purposefully hiding evidence and then refusing to help find it after your arrest?

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#129

Post by amelius »

unabst wrote: post #65

The argument here is extremely simple. Encryption is the only way to secure information. This is true for criminals and non-criminals alike. To deny encryption is to deny security to everyone. Presuming it's the criminals who will look to exploit these vulnerabilities, denying security is making every non-criminal susceptible to attack. So the only question that needs to be answered is this. Do we want to protect our…

> Even if strong encryption were made illegal, criminals will be the ones securing their data despite the law.

Well, anybody can hide their use of encryption by using steganography, [1]. E.g. you just piggy-back your secret file as noise on top of a legitimate file.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Re: DOJ: Strong encryption that we don’t have access to is “unreasonable”

#130

Post by cesarb »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #81
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean -- "there is not a gradient"? ...what do you call changing key size? It isn't that there are no levels of security, it's that you can't be at two separate levels at the same time. There is no overlap. Mandating 512-bit RSA is useless because the government could break it but so can everybody else. Allowing 4096-bit RSA wouldn't allow the government to break it. There is no middle ground. Mandating something…

>It isn't that there are no levels of security, it's that you can't be at two separate levels at the same time. There is no overlap. What do you say to DUAL_EC_DRBG, which seems to be precisely that "separate levels" of security you claim is impossible?

DUAL_EC_DRBG is, in principle, equivalent to encrypting the same data with two separate keys, each one being able to recover the plaintext. There are no "two separate levels at the same time" here: the weakest of these two keys determines your security level. With DUAL_EC_DRBG, one of these keys is a static key which, once leaked, can break every message with a small amount of extra effort.

The same applies to the recently published DUHK attack: once the hardcoded key is known, the whole thing gets broken, showing that the security level was only as strong as the weaker key.

Post reply on HN