More Encryption Is Not the Solution • Hacker News Board

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#71

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 4:22 PM UTC

fab13n wrote: post #64

Spooky23 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't NSA. It's the President(s) and Congress who define the scope. Call me naive, but I think that most of the folks at NSA, even many of the leaders, are patriots who believe that they are protecting their country.

If you believe that politicians control the bureaucracy rather than the other way around, then I respectfully disagree. Bureaucrats have expertize, inertia, the ability to sabotage many things, long term stable positions, and care about how things actually are, rather than how they look to the average voter. In many cases, including this one IMO, politicians have the appearance of control, but very little actual lati…

For better or worse, I'm intimately familiar with the strange working of bureaucracies. Obama's presidency is a textbook example of a politician being consumed by intertia.

That said, politically originated policy turned the FISA Court into a Star Chamber making Supreme Court type decisions, and broadened the scope of NSA's role from spying on the Russians to spying on humanity.

Politicians can curtail those activities as well, either by making explicit policy changes, or by defunding things strategically. It requires courage.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#72

Post by cavilling_elite » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

cinquemb wrote: post #63

a3n wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if there's a backdoor on your hardware then they have access to all your plaintext before encryption ... I can imagine a day when face to face communication gets really popular, even critical for some people.

I wonder if one day, 3d printing will be cheap enough so that one could go to the local hackerspace, Print print out chips, assemble the board/internal devices and be sure to be free from hardware backdoors?

This is feasible today. Although it takes a decent skill set. Open source communities like OpenCore.org have enough FPGA architecture to build your own RISC computer from scratch. I suspect as FPGA's become more popular and speeds improve the hacker community will move towards one-off computers they made themselves.

This coupled with your idea of 3d printing for casing is interesting.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#73

Post by jingo » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

Inconvenient Fact #4 about Privacy:

The US government was already tracking every citizen's postal mail, and storing a copy of the contents for potential later use, for many years before networked computers, "email" and the "world wide web".

Further, anyone working at a government security contractor could at their own discretion inspect any such postal mail.

I would hope you're now thinking "Wait a second. That would be quite difficult to do." Truthfully, I have no idea whether postal mail was tracked and stored; I am only trying to make a point.

My point is that one reason we're seeing a mass scale dragnet now is because _it is so easy to accomplish_.

phk seems to ignore this inconvenient fact.

I see no reason for him to try to persuade citizens to choose politics _over_ use of technology as a means to preserve their right to privacy. Why does his frame of reference need to be binary: that it's either one or the other? Is there a rationale for this?

Maybe citizens should pursue _both_?

If citizens routinely through their choice of technology make surveillance of their communications _ridiculously easy_, then how will they be perceived when they come forth and demand greater privacy? Who would take them seriously?

If citizens are to persuade their representatives that the privacy of their communications is important to protect, then I would argue they must practice what they advocate. They should not be communicating by megaphone. Or plain text.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#74

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 4:55 PM UTC

Nrsolis wrote: post #36

fab13n wrote: post #18

Encryption can be circumvented. It's hard, but doable for a state, when it targets one high-value suspect. But if everything is encrypted, they can't go "big data" on it and collect everything about everyone: if proper encryption is generalized, spying doesn't scale anymore. Big companies' ability to break the encryption between them an you is irrelevant: if they're the legitimate receiver of the communication, they…

I think the take-away from this article is that the political/legal environment is part of implementation detail you need to consider when considering a "private" communication mechanism. No crypto-system is truly secure unless BOTH sides can be trusted. If either one is even remotely possible to compromise, then that will happen . In the case where one of those parties is well-known and has something to lose, you ca…

You can both be right.

Even poorly-executed encryption will stop _some_ forms of attack, some of the time.

But a failure to provide legal protections will render even strong crypto a weak shield.

Property laws and strong fences and effective policing make for good neighbors.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#75

Post by EthanHeilman » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 5:12 PM UTC

Nrsolis wrote: post #36

fab13n wrote: post #18

Encryption can be circumvented. It's hard, but doable for a state, when it targets one high-value suspect. But if everything is encrypted, they can't go "big data" on it and collect everything about everyone: if proper encryption is generalized, spying doesn't scale anymore. Big companies' ability to break the encryption between them an you is irrelevant: if they're the legitimate receiver of the communication, they…

I think the take-away from this article is that the political/legal environment is part of implementation detail you need to consider when considering a "private" communication mechanism. No crypto-system is truly secure unless BOTH sides can be trusted. If either one is even remotely possible to compromise, then that will happen . In the case where one of those parties is well-known and has something to lose, you ca…

>No crypto-system is truly secure unless BOTH sides can be trusted. If either one is even remotely possible to compromise, then that will happen.

Depends on what you want to keep secret and mean by secure. Homomorphic encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_computing) schemes work even when an end-point is untrusted. For example a game of mental poker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker) each party/end-point is untrusted by it may still be a "secure" system.

Or consider "secure" to mean that your identity remains private if you so wish. One could certainly create a crypto system that binds an actor to an act without any end-points learning the identity of the actor, but still allowing the actor to take credit if they so wish.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#76

Post by gpcz » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 5:13 PM UTC

cavilling_elite wrote: post #72

cinquemb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if one day, 3d printing will be cheap enough so that one could go to the local hackerspace, Print print out chips, assemble the board/internal devices and be sure to be free from hardware backdoors?

This is feasible today. Although it takes a decent skill set. Open source communities like OpenCore.org have enough FPGA architecture to build your own RISC computer from scratch. I suspect as FPGA's become more popular and speeds improve the hacker community will move towards one-off computers they made themselves. This coupled with your idea of 3d printing for casing is interesting.

Doesn't that just offload the backdoor potential to the FPGA rather than a CPU?

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#77

Post by tsahyt » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

koralatov wrote: post #44

tsahyt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least using PGP or GPG for your emails isn't much effort. These tools are very easy to integrate into all of the common mail clients and some web services. The only "hard" part is to get your communication partners to use them as well.

The only "hard" part is to get your communication partners to use them as well. Where ``hard'' means, ``really, really hard''.

Yes, but not in a technical sense. People think encryption is hard. They believe that they have to jump huge hurdles and will be confronted with an incredible learning curve in order to protect their privacy via encryption. The fact of the matter is, that this is simply a misconception. There's nothing hard about using PGP for instance. It integrates nicely almost everywhere the typical user would want to use it with. The process is already rather streamlined. Our job as those who know this is to educate those who don't in how to use encryption. Most people I've done this with so far said something like "What? That's it?".

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#78

Post by cinquemb » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 5:35 PM UTC

gpcz wrote: post #76

cavilling_elite wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is feasible today. Although it takes a decent skill set. Open source communities like OpenCore.org have enough FPGA architecture to build your own RISC computer from scratch. I suspect as FPGA's become more popular and speeds improve the hacker community will move towards one-off computers they made themselves. This coupled with your idea of 3d printing for casing is interesting.

Doesn't that just offload the backdoor potential to the FPGA rather than a CPU?

I was wondering about that too. So we're down to buying silicon wafers in the the mail, 3d printer or some set up to dope them using open source designs? Is this possible now?

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#79

Post by tsahyt » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 5:43 PM UTC

mikkom wrote: post #38

fab13n wrote: post #18

Encryption can be circumvented. It's hard, but doable for a state, when it targets one high-value suspect. But if everything is encrypted, they can't go "big data" on it and collect everything about everyone: if proper encryption is generalized, spying doesn't scale anymore. Big companies' ability to break the encryption between them an you is irrelevant: if they're the legitimate receiver of the communication, they…

> Encryption can be circumvented. It's hard, but doable for a state, when it targets one high-value suspect. But if everything is encrypted, they can't go "big data" on it and collect everything about everyone That's what they (NSA) actually are doing/trying to do right now, collecting everything about everyone and decrypting it later when/if needed. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-ns...

I don't quite believe that the NSA can reliably perform a ciphertext-only attack on RSA or even AES.

As far as we know, integer factorization is still hard, so RSA is still secure, given large enough keys. There's Shors Algorithm for quantum computers but these are still very much experimental things and subject to research. Besides, building, maintaining and running one is incredibly expensive. I might underestimate the NSA here though.

AES has been broken in theory but the results have no real repercussions. A "break" is anything faster than brute-force, no matter whether it actually makes the process computationally feasible or not. In the real world it doesn't currently matter whether we search through 2^256 keys or have a complexity of 2^254.4. Both are vastly out of the reach of current computers. AES has been rated as "suitable for top secret". There is reasons to believe that the NSA uses AES themselves. Knowing about a ciphertext-only attack would put their very own secrets at risk. If such an attack exists, it will only be a matter of time until somebody else finds it.

There are other weaknesses in both these systems though, most of which are due to implementation and physical realities. Side-channel attacks are known for both RSA and AES as well as for SSL.

So yes, they might very well collect everything right now but unless they are many decades ahead of the rest of the world in terms of cryptanalysis, they can't do anything with the data for now.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#80

Post by dobbsbob » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 5:59 PM UTC

conformal wrote: post #42

Nrsolis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the take-away from this article is that the political/legal environment is part of implementation detail you need to consider when considering a "private" communication mechanism. No crypto-system is truly secure unless BOTH sides can be trusted. If either one is even remotely possible to compromise, then that will happen . In the case where one of those parties is well-known and has something to lose, you ca…

> Have YOU inspected your CPU/Firmware/OS/Applications for backdoors? Even with the full source code? this is absolutely spot on, especially the firmware. nobody talks about it and the attack surface is huge. just to be explicit, hardware backdoors exist as well :)

Not to mention backdoors in routers/cable modems and god knows what else. Every carrier is preloading in spyware to SIM cards now too, wait for that big revelation soon. They can already track you with their program that responds to type 0 sms and now they can OTA update your SIM to run voice capture, sms capture, store accelerometer data for decryption use, turn on the mic and listen in or turn on the camera.