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

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

#151
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…

>Oh, and the "it's technologically impossible" argumentbe the only one you need -- but they refuse to hear that. Things like DUAL_EC_DRBG seem to prove this claim false.

I guess if you set the bar for what you want to accomplish at barely above "nobody is allowed to encrypt anything, ever." Nobody would knowingly use such a scheme. It's also a security hole giving access to anyone with the key, which is sure to be leaked/compromised if shared with the entire DOJ and others. Also, once the key is compromised, everything in the past that was ever encrypted is now readable by anyone.

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

#152

This subject always reminds me of a talk I heard Eben Moglen give, where he said: "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration. On…

I don’t get it.

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

#153

This subject always reminds me of a talk I heard Eben Moglen give, where he said: "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration. On…

It's odd because peoples desire for anonymity is preventing their use of good encryption. A solid online identity and reliable way to get data to you without 3rd parties would be a good foundation for exchanging keys and encrypting data between parties. I'm talking fixed IP addresses as a starting point. We have whole infrastructure to make it easy to interact with public web sites (DNS, etc) but it's very hard to fi…

Aside from widely broadcast one-time pad encrypted/authenticated messages (which provides anonymity for the receiver, not the sender -- that can be bootstrapped), deterministic rotating asymmetric key pairs (say, a non-compromised curve ECC scheme using Key Families) coupled with a relatively-high non-deterministic latency mixnet delivery system using onion/garlic routing for intermix peers goes a long way towards achieving data security, authentication and metadata anonymity for all involved parties. Discovery and routing in such a system is a very complicated problem -- and it's one yet to be solved; though, generally if one is going to such lengths, one has a rendezvous system already in place.

The primary problem is that it's expensive for users -- expensive in terms of time, cost, and complexity; which means usage is low. Consequently, it also makes people targets simply for using the system as the number of those using the system is relatively small -- something one can't really get away from easily unless makes it look like one isn't using the technology. To do that, one then has to go through the effort of creating cover traffic -- and creating consistently good cover traffic (good enough to fool a human analyst, because one is one of thousands, not one of millions/thousands of millions) is immensely difficult and techniques change over time w/ local conditions so it's hard to automate. Life gets really really difficult when survival depends not only on keeping people out but also on keeping them from knowing anything of interest is there in the first place!

Don't forget about stylometry and inadvertent signatures; never communicate in real time, avoid absolutely everything but plain text data if at all possible, write very plainly (say, using only first few thousand most common words in your language) and use stylometry defeating tools (for example, Anonymouth -- though I haven't audited it; others have, but it's still just a thin layer to apply to other work) to prevent others from creating signatures based on the words you use and how you use them. NEVER forget that binary data you send might contain metadata fields to give you away (version numbers, encoding settings -- all seemingly innocuous but possibly unique to you!). Sending images? Make absolutely certain your camera doesn't have sensor glitches that can create a signature. ( see https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/digital_camer... ) Don't forget your surroundings either ( NSFW Language/Topic (4Chan helps track down targets) but incredibly illustrative - https://i.imgur.com/nLCklgZ.jpg ). Sending scans of documents? Most new printers print identifying patterns using steganographic techniques. ( see https://www.eff.org/issues/printers ). Stop and meet someone and both of you brought your mobiles? The fact that your phones traveled together, and where you went, is recorded (CO-TRAVELLER; see https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-t... ). The world is INCREDIBLY hostile to anonymity seekers.

Relying on third parties to strip data isn't a workable anonymity solution because you can't trust them to do so, correctly or at all. Not to mention that; but with pervasive internet monitoring (which, thanks to Snowden, we know is real) the mere fact that you've communicated with someone or a site storing your data is stored in a place where it cannot be wiped by any party authorised to participate in your conversation. Generally, if you're not anonymous to the person you're communicating with, until you choose to identify yourself during communications who's contents may then be repudiated (say, an olm/axolotl ratchet) at a later time by publishing that private key, now expired and no longer good for future authentication -- then you won't be anonymous to any party, period.

It's a trust no-one, verify everything type of situation; people don't deal well with that. Pervasive encryption is only the first and easiest step. If you want true (or even just reasonable) anonymity, things get very expensive, very quickly.

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

#154

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…

What is the plan for when (not if) that master key leaks?

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Yes it will. A single user being careless with their password only exposes that user. Leaking the master key (and it will leak) exposes everyone. The target is much bigger, the payoff is much bigger for the bad guys, the risks are im…

> Leaking the master key (and it will leak) exposes everyone

I agree that it should be assumed that the key will leak but there are plenty of ways to practically mitigate the usefulness of a leaked key.

I mentioned expiring keys already, which is obvious, but there are more sophisticated protocols that can be put in place.

> The target is much bigger, the payoff is much bigger for the bad guys

I don't think this is true. These keys would only be usable with physical access to a device. If you have physical access to the device its hard to imagine a scenario where the easiest route to cracking it would be penetrating a secure government facility.

Let me add that you have to think about security in relative and not absolute terms.

If you trust the government to secure a massive stockpile of NBC weapons, if you trust the government to manage a massive state security apparatus with hundreds of thousands of armed agents deployed domestically, then it is a little silly to draw the line at trusting them with your facebook feed.

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

#156

This subject always reminds me of a talk I heard Eben Moglen give, where he said: "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration. On…

I don’t get it.

I think, roughly, the government can't really stop you encrypting stuff but it's fairly easy for them and a bunch of advertisers to track what you are up to online.

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

#157

You can't legislate reality. You can't legislate physics, or the value of pi, or weather or not it's technically possible to create nuclear weapons. The fact is that strong public key encryption is possible with a few lines of code. No matter how hard they jump up and don't the universe is not going to put that genie back in the bottle because someone writes a law or an executive order.

> You can't legislate [...] the value of pi

Amusingly someone (inadvertently) tried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

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

#158

You can't legislate reality. You can't legislate physics, or the value of pi, or weather or not it's technically possible to create nuclear weapons. The fact is that strong public key encryption is possible with a few lines of code. No matter how hard they jump up and don't the universe is not going to put that genie back in the bottle because someone writes a law or an executive order.

I tend to think that encryption should not be regulated, but I don't agree with your analysis either; it's too dismissive of a much more nuanced reality.

You can very easily make it so all consumer devices ship with software that only uses encryption that the government has escrowed keys for. You can require app stores to have the same requirement. The government requires all sorts of things of people who manufacture products. Of course, they can't regulate the 3d printer or CNC mill in your garage, but that doesn't make regulating mass-produced products a futile effort.

Yes, some people will get around it. They will use open-source software that they download and install themselves on devices that allow sideloading apps. But no one in the government expects perfection out of this. They expect that most criminals, most terrorists even, are not so sophisticated, not so careful, that they will avoid being ensnared.

Remember that the situation they are trying to avoid is one where EVERYONE'S texts and phone calls are by-default hopelessly inaccessible to the government, even with a warrant (or in the case of foreign targets, even with the most sophisticated HUMINT and SIGINT).

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

#159
From a practical point of view I'm not sure there are any criminal activities that have happened because of strong encryption being available? I mean with things like the 911 attacks it didn't seem to make any difference. On the other hand encryption is very useful for financial transactions and the like. It seems the benefits considerably outway the problems.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Encryption is the only way to secure information. I am not sure that this argument is simple at all. Encryption only provides theoretical security. In practice even if strong encryption can't be broken it can almost always be bypassed rather trivially if data is being accessed on a regular basis. If data is encrypted and left cold then that can be difficult or impossible to retrieve if a secure key is used and that…

This ignores transport encryption, which is the bulk of what protects you on a daily basis from street criminals.

Interesting example. Transport encryption provides basically no real world security at all. The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of millions of credit cards with full PII available for sale so it is almost certain that whatever PII you are sending over your highly secure connection is already in the hands of criminals.

The only security you have is the fact that there aren't nearly enough criminals to exploit all of the info that has already been stolen so there is a very low chance that you will be a victim of identity theft, but it has nothing to do with transport layer encryption.

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