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Rethinking Encryption

lawfareblog.com

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Re: Rethinking Encryption

#91

Post by authoritarian »

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…

>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

Lets see your proofs demonstrating this

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#92

Post by athrowaway3z »

Because this article is an explanation to the anti-encryption crowd the author takes his time to lay out their arguments as a token of understanding their position. Still, i want to bitch about some of them.

> In my work at the FBI, I encountered directly how encryption makes it harder for law enforcement to detect, prevent and solve certain types of crime in specific instances.

Encrypted data is a known unknown. This doesn't work as an argument without speculating on the scope of unknown unknowns.

> I’m confident that this problem can be addressed from a technical perspective. In most cases, it’s just software, and software can be rewritten.

That works both ways. ( Source code for effective encryption is less text then this blog piece )

> the United States has not experienced a terrorist or other attack of sufficient magnitude where encryption clearly played a key role in preventing law enforcement from thwarting it

And i can't think of any realistic scenario in which it would. The window of cause-and-effect is extremely small. The attack needs to hinge on the tools that the US has authority over. i.e. Why would Osama use WhatsApp on an iPhone in the first place?

> inherently vulnerable network of networks

This is the wrong way around. Its a 'network of inherently vulnerable networks'. Which is the safest option. ( As the author later notes but doesn't reflect on )

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#93

Post by nullstyle »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #84
paggle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "cannot compel you to translate," you mean "must not compel" or "should not compel," because an entity that controls 11 aircraft carriers can compel you to translate whatever the hell they want you to.

What does 11 carrier strike groups have to do with the 5th amendment? The former is to project power beyond the borders of the United States. The latter is to protect you from an abusive government domestically. Also to take it further, technically, the US Constitution does not apply beyond our borders (like any other US law, absent a bilateral treaty). I fail to see the connection you are trying to make.

Not GP, but I think further exploration of the point being made can be found here: https://www.xkcd.com/538/

If you prefer to hear similar sentiments from one of saints of comedy: https://youtu.be/gaa9iw85tW8?t=261

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#94

Post by skyyler »

seppin wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Backdoors have been revealed a few times in US products, but US companies have learned their lesson and appear to be pushing back. Yeah, that's not exactly the case...

In comparison to Chinese companies which comply 100% of the time with Chinese military intelligence, it matters.

I'm on your side here, but throwing around baseless acquisitions isn't helpful.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#95

Post by coldtea »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #79
coldtea wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a cloud service that's available worldwide should store and process data locally in every country (or perhaps even every sub-jurisdiction of every country) just so that that jurisdiction can serve warrants to it and others cannot? Simply put, yes. You are maybe concerned with the technical issues / problems to the service provider. I'm more concerned with the decentralization, surveillance, and data sovereignty.…

> Simply put, yes. Feel free to build such services, if you wish. > You are maybe concerned with the technical issues / problems to the service provider. Not just that (though I certainly don't consider it reasonable to expect a service to have thousands of servers in thousands of jurisdictions and deal with thousands of legal systems; frankly, I want services to expose themselves to as few jurisdictions as possible)…

>Feel free to build such services, if you wish.

Well, I don't propose or expect companies to volunteer doing this.

My point is that EU (for one) should mandate them, and if service providers like FB, etc, don't like them, they could skip the 500m market -- and just be careful not to let the door hit them on their way out...

>Not just that (though I certainly don't consider it reasonable to expect a service to have thousands of servers in thousands of jurisdictions and deal with thousands of legal systems; frankly, I want services to expose themselves to as few jurisdictions as possible).

As long as it's your jurisdiction? (assuming you're in the US, since it says on your HN profile that you work for Intel).

Or that's a happy accident (for you) that is not really relevant to your point, but others should be fine with?

I'd prefer the services I use to be under the control of my country's laws and my democratic vote -- not under what some third country dictates and controls.

Besides, hyperbole much?

There aren't "thousands of jurisdictions and legal systems". At worst, they are like 150 or so, as many countries. And some could get together and accept a single country as the host and set their common rules (like the EU could do for EU member states).

Major services already have tons of global CDNs servers, even on small countries.

And if there was a mandate, there could easily be an infrastructure and common services to deploy to span the globe (e.g. turn-key Amazon provision for sharding your data into multiple data centers per jurisdiction).

It doesn't even need to be all players, could be mandated on some size and above -- and surely Google, Facebook, Apple, etc scale.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#96

Post by coldtea »

seppin wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Backdoors have been revealed a few times in US products, but US companies have learned their lesson and appear to be pushing back. Yeah, that's not exactly the case...

In comparison to Chinese companies which comply 100% of the time with Chinese military intelligence, it matters.

I'm not sure token non-compliance (and non-compliance theater) makes much of a difference...

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#97

Post by modeless »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #83
modeless wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China already got golden keys for Chinese iPhones. Apple handed them iCloud.

That is technically incorrect. As I understand it, the iPhones are generic (global), but the iCloud service is what the Chinese authorities have full snooping rights to. Apple doesn't cut a custom firmware with special/additional golden keys or anything of that nature, as I understand it, for anyone . The iPhone in this case is safe, assuming you don't use iCloud, in China.

> assuming you don't use iCloud

But most people use iCloud, right? Apple forbids you from using competing full phone cloud backup services. The built in backup software continuously sends iCloud copies of most user data on the phone.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#98

Post by Hikikomori »

jeroenhd wrote: post #39
jjeaff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every three or four months Cisco or Juniper get caught having introduced a new backdoor. Hardcoded admin passwords, full system access backdoors following a specific port knocking sequence, you name it. Sure, some companies have started pushing back but the companies that produce critical network infrastructure can't be trusted.

Backdoors or just shitty developers and security practices?

What port knocking backdoor?

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#99

Post by mnm1 »

gampleman wrote: post #64
coldtea wrote: post #59

> 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 d…

While I agree with you, I can also appreciate that intelligence/law enforcement agencies are not keen to go back to the alternatives. HUMINT is a nasty (in the moral sense), dangerous, and expensive enterprise. Would you rather train for a few years, then live a fake life with the constant threat of gruesome death, lying to everyone you know - possibly even your fake wife and kids or rather just tap a few phones/emai…

Of course I'd rather have my privacy even if it means thousands of CIA agents get tortured and killed. They're the ones who signed up for that job, a job that is likely unnecessary. And even the necessary spying would in no way justify that I and everyone else give up our privacy. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have already died so we could have that privacy in the first place. A few thousand more dying to keep it is a miniscule price to pay at this point, a negligible price. So are a few crimes being committed that could potentially have been stopped by back doors.

Re: Rethinking Encryption

#100

Post by snarf21 »

akersten wrote: post #4

This is fundamentally a fight about the autonomy of the human mind, and what the government can command you to do with your own brain. 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…

What you say is close but not quite accurate. What you describe is what used to happen before mobile phones, people called each other on pay phones and used coded messages. You had to infiltrate these organizations to catch them. The same solution works today. It is just not as manpower and time efficient as back doors.

The reason this is a fight now is because you can target the chain. To use your analogy above: it is more like I know someone in that tribe and I send them a message in english and they translate and pass it along. On the other side is someone in the tribe who translates it back into english for the recipient. The message is never broken in its encoded form, only on the on/off ramps. Pressure can be applied to Apple or WhatsApp to provide access to the data pre/post encoding. This is what the Australia laws demands (and the inability to disclose the back door). The point remains the same, it is only as strong as its weakest link.

How can we know that WhatsApp hasn't been patched with a back door? What about the operating system? What about the secure enclave chip itself? The only hope we have here is that companies will say no and/or whistleblowers will speak out.

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