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France rejects backdoor mandate

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Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#221

Post by mrweasel »

anthk wrote: post #177
daniel-s wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't dumb people. They know exactly what they're asking for. Privacy and security of the public's data is not a priority to them, surveillance and power is. Politicians would much prefer all communication in plaintext, to hell with individual freedoms and privacy, especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries. What politician do you expect to o…

You mean UKUSA? Echelon? Patriot Act? SSL and encryption 'bans' making the vendors get OpenSSL from the Canadian OpenBSD?

OpenSSL = OpenSSL Software Foundation Inc / OpenSSL Software Services Inc (In the US)

OpenSSH = OpenBSD (In Canada).

OpenBSD does maintain a fork of OpenSSL, called LibreSSL.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#222

Post by throwaway290 »

csomar wrote: post #133
palata wrote: post #3

Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and climate change, it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography, but they should also not have no clue at all. Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryptio…

> it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing. That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. T…

This is the line of Russian propaganda. But don't try to explain by malice if it can be perfectly explained by incompetence.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#223

Post by anthk »

mrweasel wrote: post #221
anthk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean UKUSA? Echelon? Patriot Act? SSL and encryption 'bans' making the vendors get OpenSSL from the Canadian OpenBSD?

OpenSSL = OpenSSL Software Foundation Inc / OpenSSL Software Services Inc (In the US) OpenSSH = OpenBSD (In Canada). OpenBSD does maintain a fork of OpenSSL, called LibreSSL.

OpenBSD had a SSL stack too, not bound to US licenses and restrictions on exporting.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#224

Post by orbital-decay »

throwaway290 wrote: post #222
csomar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing. That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. T…

This is the line of Russian propaganda. But don't try to explain by malice if it can be perfectly explained by incompetence.

Unbelievable. What does Russian propaganda of all damn things has to do with this? Especially considering that the power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive, which I'm telling you as someone who tried to resist that takeover. Yes, your politicians - all politicians, regardless of the country - would have been happy to have more power over you and need to be kept in check. They are never naive, only you can be naive by assuming that. If you forget this for a second, you're done. This is not some kind of controversial issue all of a sudden, that's basic democracy.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#225

Post by amelius »

BowBun wrote: post #98
amelius wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works. Even if you don't have the encryption keys you can read messages by breaking into a phone and taking screenshots, for example.

If you've broken into the phone/app, you've got access to the key...

But it's only useful if you understand how encryption works.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#226

Post by upofadown »

precommunicator wrote: post #128
spapas82 wrote: post #63

> provision that would have forced messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to allow hidden access to private conversations. The fact that this could have been possible is the reason why the pgp/gpg way ( you manage your certificate and you choose whose certificates to trust) is still the only way to have true encrypted communications. Using centralised services to encrypt important data is a joke.

PGP/GPG by default have no perfect forward secrecy though. In Signal you can check the certificates checksums in conversation settings, to compare them e.g. when physically present to the other device. There are other solutions that use Signal protocol or that have PFS that are decentralized. And you can build your own, it's open source at the end. Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain markets tha…

If you keep your messages around in some form then that effectively defeats forward secrecy. In any case where the attacker can get your secret encryption key material, they will be able to get any messages you still have access to. Most people want to keep their old messages around. So for messaging, forward secrecy is of little practical value. If you do keep your messages around, then PGP's encrypt once[1] scheme is much better than what most other systems do. The message is encrypted and stays encrypted. It is never in a decrypted state unless the user wants to look at it. This normally involves the entry of a secure passphrase.

Contrast that with typical instant messengers where the security of retained messages is entirely up to the device security. The implementation of a forward secrecy scheme ironically makes this more likely. Once the session key is deleted, the easiest way to keep the message around is to leave it as plaintext. So the user either has to turn on self deleting messages and lose those messages, or has to leave those messages available to potential attackers.

BTW, "forward secrecy" is a terrible term for usability. Something like "message burning" much better fits with a typical users conceptual context.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:encryptonce

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#227

Post by rdm_blackhole »

kergonath wrote: post #55
mytailorisrich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades. It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first. So, in fact, it is a fairly typical European country... The spread of "narcotrafic" is an example of that, there are others. If you follow French news you'll see many.

> France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades. What are you on about? What does the "unpatriotic" bit have to do with anything? > It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first. Right. What would "putting country first" mean? France is doing what it wanted to do for decades, which is consolidating European power to its advantage. Is tha…

Crime is under-reported in France because most people know that wasting your time to go to a police station to report a small crime is basically useless as nothing will come out of it.

I have talked about it on this forum. I have had my car broken into multiple times in France, and each time I had to file a police report. Guess how many times the culprits were caught? A big fat zero.

So the statistics look good. But what about the reality? Do you think a women coming home at night is felling safer now than she would have been 30 years ago? I don't think so.

Not too mention the rampant Islamism that has taken over entire suburbs were women are not free to wear what they want and the cops don't go there unless they have the CRS (riot police) with them to protect them in case something goes wrong.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#228

Post by zkmon »

Any grouping (such as nation) of individuals arises from some loss of freedom, income and privacy for the individuals. The loss of individuals or the contribution is the element that powers the nation or a community. 100% privacy means zero privacy-related contribution towards legal enforcement. So the question is all about striking a balance between loss of privacy and the need for legal enforcement. The negotiations would continue, to arrive at the acceptable/needed level of privacy loss.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#229

Post by fransje26 »

artursapek wrote: post #214
latexr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works. Hanlon’s razor isn’t always true, sometimes it really is malice. Considering EU ministers want to exempt themselves from Chat Control, that suggests to me they do understand enough of the basics. https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...

I love the combination of them naming this evil bill "Child Sexual Abuse Regulation Proposal" to make it sound like an obviously good idea, and them asking to be exempt from it. So are you implying you are abusing children?

[flagged]

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#230

Post by rdm_blackhole »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #193
letsownmeansofp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the conversations seem to stay focus on e2ee good or bad; it’s important to question - is this the correct focus? Drugs should not be illegal in the first place; decriminalising them is known to have good results, (look at Portugal) it weakens organised crime and black markets, less costs for the justice system, less health issues and less need for public health money to be spent on dealing with resulting issues, the…

> Drugs should not be illegal in the first place; decriminalising them is known to have good results, (look at Portugal) I have no knowledge on the impact of that policy. On the other hand bruno Retailleau said at National Assembly that this kind of policy doesn’t work. What happens is that there are expensive legal drug and cheaper illegal drug that organized criminals provide. Hence there are more drug user but bar…

Tobacco is expensive because the French government is using the taxes on it to make up the overall shortfall of tax revenue. See the budget deficit from last year.

Obviously the French government is saying that this is for health reasons but that reason has gone out of the window when a pack of smokes is 13 euros.

So the black market flourishes.

You can't keep increasing the price of a good without making sure that it can't be imported from elsewhere and since France is part of Europe and it no longer has any border checks, it very easy to smuggle cigarettes from Portugal or Spain.

This tactic of increasing the price of cigarettes or alcohol works in a place like Australia where it's orders of magnitude harder to smuggle things since stuff has to come either through airports or boats which are both watched carefully by the state.

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