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Rethinking Encryption

lawfareblog.com

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Re: Rethinking Encryption

#51

Post by solstice »

deogeo wrote: post #50

> But going dark is broader than encryption; it involves the decreasing ability of the government to conduct effective lawful surveillance for many technical reasons, including but not limited to the widespread adoption of encryption technology. The 'going dark' boogeyman - how predictable. Only in the mind of a spy agency shill does the rapidly growing number of surveillance cameras, facial recognition, flying surve…

Have you read the whole (admittedly rather long) article? He has a pretty nuanced view of it imo, especially at the end and explicitly refers to the "golden age of surveillance"

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#52

Post by pmlnr »

jjeaff wrote: post #37
jeroenhd wrote: post #17

This guy is all about how much of a threat the expansion of Chinese hardware is but doesn't say a word about the same being true for American hardware. Chinese networking hardware may contain backdoors, American hardware has been confirmed to contain backdoors over and over again. Re: the iPhone: when any country has the golden keys, every country has the golden keys. How hard is it to. Get that through your head. Th…

Backdoors have been revealed a few times in US products, but US companies have learned their lesson and appear to be pushing back. 9/11 is almost a decade in the past and the Snowden revelations embarrassed several companies. Things like warrant canaries are pretty common and companies like Apple have been publicly fighting government attempts to access Apple devices in court. One thing the US has going for it is tha…

"US companies have learned their lesson"

SURE. And they are all GDPR compliant as well.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#53

Post by solstice »

jeroenhd wrote: post #17

This guy is all about how much of a threat the expansion of Chinese hardware is but doesn't say a word about the same being true for American hardware. Chinese networking hardware may contain backdoors, American hardware has been confirmed to contain backdoors over and over again. Re: the iPhone: when any country has the golden keys, every country has the golden keys. How hard is it to. Get that through your head. Th…

His whole point is to not weaken encryption but to strengthen it, despite the likely social costs that will incur. Have you read the conclusion of the article?

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#54

Post by temptemptemp111 »

dev_dull wrote: post #7

I’m extremely skeptical about ANYTHING put out by this group, and Jim Baker in particular. This guy was general counsel for the FBI at the same time they were abusing FISA warrants to secretly spy on Trump admins. You think they’ll stop at Trump? They’re just getting started. We need to get back to our roots of being extremely careful about our intelligence agencies. I know you’ll initially be turned off by the subje…

Pretty annoyed with how censorship prone HN is... I'm just surprised at how much people will put up with before moving to their own "news" platform(s).

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#55

Post by ajdlinux »

close04 wrote: post #29
ajdlinux wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you and a cohort were the last survivors of a dying tribe, with your own special language that no one understood, and you criminally conspired with them via written word, the government could not compel you to translate your messages just because they cannot understand them. That's the 5th Amendment in action, as you'd be creating testimony against yourself. Ignoring the fact that it seems, uh, unwise to ask a d…

> should we reinterpret That's the problem with these rights: they're always up for interpretation. And the interpretation can be anything a handful of politically appointed people want.

That is also not a solvable problem. Someone's got to do the interpreting, and if your perfect legal system is so perfect as to not permit the occasional reinterpretation as circumstances and opinions change, it'll just collapse in on itself and be replaced by one that does.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#56

Post by deogeo »

solstice wrote: post #51
deogeo wrote: post #50

> But going dark is broader than encryption; it involves the decreasing ability of the government to conduct effective lawful surveillance for many technical reasons, including but not limited to the widespread adoption of encryption technology. The 'going dark' boogeyman - how predictable. Only in the mind of a spy agency shill does the rapidly growing number of surveillance cameras, facial recognition, flying surve…

Have you read the whole (admittedly rather long) article? He has a pretty nuanced view of it imo, especially at the end and explicitly refers to the "golden age of surveillance"

He says "some argue that society is in a golden age of surveillance" exactly once, but repeatedly presents 'going dark' as fact. That the rest of his view is nuanced doesn't make that aspect any less of a lie.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#58

Post by auslander »

> The problem is that there is no law that clearly empowers governmental actors to obtain court orders to compel third parties (such as equipment manufacturers and service providers) to configure their systems to allow the government to obtain the plain text

That kinda sums the article, but US Gov always finds ways to compel anyone to anything. Raw power. Takeaway is to be your own equipment manufacturer and service provider, as in cheap mini x86 boxes running open source daemons, over proxychains and VPNs. Rotate equipment, hacked wifi APs and identities monthly, use Signal on iOS and hide in the crowd, because if you're on the watch list, game is over. Cyberpunk at its best.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#59

Post by coldtea »

>But going dark is broader than encryption; it involves the decreasing ability of the government to conduct effective lawful surveillance

That wasn't an ability of government in 1900 or 1800, so why should we worry that this new-fangled ability has been decreasing lately?

Who said it should be an ability for government, and much more, an eternal one, and not a temporary accidental capability due to a few technical developments that allowed it for a short span of time?

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#60

Post by necovek »

backdoorsgalore wrote: post #20
michaelmrose wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to lock the USB stick in such a fashion as to be impossible to decrypt in a practical time frame. Furthermore it's practical to communicate in such a fashion that grabbing one party only grants you access to communication intended for this party. If really paranoid it might only grant you access to communication between compromise and his fellows realizing that he is burned. Maybe nothing at all if you c…

All public encryption algorithms have backdoors in their implementation and sometimes (as with Elliptic Curve standards from NIST adopted in the browser) in their spec. You might get lucky if you have a cryptographer design you a custom algorithm but that's mostly security thru obscurity and if a state actor really wanted to defeat it they may just kidnap the cryptographer at gun point and have them reveal how to. Cr…

If this was the case, there would be no push in government sectors to diminish cryptography and provide backdoors.

Or perhaps they are double-bluffing us? ;-)

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