Interesting read, bookmarking it until my boss stops staring at everyone's morning monitors. Thanks for sharing!
Rethinking Encryption
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#22Unbelievable: think of the children in a grand and pseudo-legalistic way. And this guy is serious!
As of secrets were something new.
“Society has failed to protect children”. No, man: they were never as protected as you purport they were. You are just rewriting history.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#23Despite the length of this article, I see no plan for the obvious rebuttal of terrorists: if you make whatsapp or some other app not end to end encrypted, the terrorists will make their own app. Its not difficult to generate your own symmetric key and use openssl to encrypt and decrypt information sent with that key. Sure, you can force apple to reveal the contents of the hard drive, but whats the difference if apple…
Apple could, for example, switch out the version of an app on my phone with a backdoored version of the same app. The backdoored version could upload a copy of every message I send to law enforcement. It wouldn’t even be difficult - just a keylogger would do the trick, or the OS could periodically take screenshots of the app while it is open and send them somewhere nefarious. Those latter techniques would also work w…
Ironically, using a corporate store for app deployment could become less safe than downloading something through your browser at that point.
I give Apple the benefit of the doubt and appreciate their stance, but with a legislative basis they too would have to comply.
I also think that professional criminals wouldn't use their phones in the first place if it is tied to their ID in any way. Sure, you might catch some of the riff-raff, but I think strong encryption is more beneficial for any form of security in the broader picture.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#24Despite the length of this article, I see no plan for the obvious rebuttal of terrorists: if you make whatsapp or some other app not end to end encrypted, the terrorists will make their own app. Its not difficult to generate your own symmetric key and use openssl to encrypt and decrypt information sent with that key. Sure, you can force apple to reveal the contents of the hard drive, but whats the difference if apple…
Apple could, for example, switch out the version of an app on my phone with a backdoored version of the same app. The backdoored version could upload a copy of every message I send to law enforcement. It wouldn’t even be difficult - just a keylogger would do the trick, or the OS could periodically take screenshots of the app while it is open and send them somewhere nefarious. Those latter techniques would also work w…
I dont quite buy the "switch the app" argument as code signing easily fixes that. Intercepting at a higher level such as a keylogger or screenshotter would work, but then you'd apply the same argument: the terrorists would just go one level higher. In fact they could go all the way to open source processors running their own code doing all the same things. Yes, it would delay them a few years to get there, but once there there would be little the US could do to stop it. At the network level, we simply dont sign hardware, so without some major refactoring to the core system, theres little to do there. Still though, at every level of this back and forth, consumers have to give up more and more privacy to allow the government to step in and get the same level of information they had before about terrorists until the terrorists will eventually win (or we completely lose privacy and trillions of dollars in infrastructure). So why play the game?
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#25I'm confused at the assumption that you can prevent serious organized criminals from having access to strong cryptography simply by backdooring common communications apps. The genie is out of the bottle: Powerful criminal enterprises will have no difficulty hiring people to build overlay tools that they can run inside their backdoored comms that will provide adequate (at least, if not effectively unbreakable) cryptog…
Actions to block access to encryption would severely degrade the security and privacy of the general public..
Perhaps that's the point.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#26This is all theater to give people a warm-fuzzy about the way things are.
Other than cock-blocking ISPs, what's the value in end-to-end encryption when one of those ends is a megacorporation that is A) super-friendly with the state security apparatus, and B) ready, willing, and able to sell you out to the highest bidder? E2E works great against basement-dwelling h4x0rs, not so much against people with actual power.
I know these companies will swear up and down how secure they are--but security of what? Who audits them? Last I checked, no one.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#27I was thinking about this subject today. If the US has laws that prohibit legitimate encryption and other countries do not... Is it fair to suggest that we are making ourselves easy targets to foreign nations who wish to practice privacy violations? I don’t think about encryption as a method to protect myself from the US government (only) but from any entity that is local or foreign. I think everyone should have the…
Not only that, foreign businesses are less likely to trust anything stored with or touched by US companies. And that's not even getting into regulated industries where it might become illegal to do business.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple could, for example, switch out the version of an app on my phone with a backdoored version of the same app. The backdoored version could upload a copy of every message I send to law enforcement. It wouldn’t even be difficult - just a keylogger would do the trick, or the OS could periodically take screenshots of the app while it is open and send them somewhere nefarious. Those latter techniques would also work w…
I dont quite buy the "switch the app" argument as code signing easily fixes that. Intercepting at a higher level such as a keylogger or screenshotter would work, but then you'd apply the same argument: the terrorists would just go one level higher. In fact they could go all the way to open source processors running their own code doing all the same things. Yes, it would delay them a few years to get there, but once t…
> In fact they could go all the way to open source processors running their own code doing all the same things. Yes, it would delay them a few years to get there, but once there there would be little the US could do to stop it.
well as long as you can't easily build private fab out there capable of building such processors, good luck with that. There are not that many fabs out there. Fpga's aren't any better, since most of them you can't even make work without large quantities of proprietary blobs.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#29This 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…
> 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.
Re: Rethinking Encryption
#30Earlier 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…
Encryption is not trivial to implement right, but it is also not impossible to defend against reasonable threat models. You make claims without giving any proof.