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More Encryption Is Not the Solution

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Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#41

Post by frenger »

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 wonder how big a jump it would be to have some mandated service running on every machine, to sidestep increased encrypted Internet traffic? Still seems unlikely but I've been so surprised by the level of apathy by most to this that I can almost imagine it

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#42

Post by conformal »

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…

> 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 :)

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#43

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #20
nodefortytwo wrote: post #4

The main issue is governments can't be trusted, a technical solution (which may not be encryption) is that only option we have.

When a government couldn't be trusted by the general population in the past, you got revolution. Or if it couldn't be trusted by a part of the population (e.g blacks) you got civil rights activism. Only a very lazy and apolitical society would say that technology is the only recourse.

> * When a government couldn't be trusted by the general population in the past, you got revolution.*

To get a revolution the government would have to start to starve people. I don't think there was any period in history of organized nation-states when people trusted those in power.

> Only a very lazy and apolitical society would say that technology is the only recourse.

Technology is a force multiplier. Moreover, technology shapes the environment we live in. We can all see that groups of people behave like water. They do what they have always done (i.e. move down the potential gradient). You can try and do politics all you want, but this tend to be as pointless as arguing with water to start flowing upstream. What you can do is to change the potential gradient, and let the people achieve your goals by doing what they were always doing.

That's why I think technological solutions are important, and probably we should focus mainly on them.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#44

Post by koralatov »

tsahyt wrote: post #30
tezza wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really admire your sober and well thought out proposal. Implementing what you suggest is just such a lot of work. Certainly too much for me, when I weight up the odds I'll fall foul of Big Brother ( as an Oz living in London. Burma, Saudi, etc have clear problems ) I believe that if one comes on the radar of Big Brother, it is for boring mundane reasons like they don't like your politics, they don't like someone yo…

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''.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#45

Post by mseebach »

DennisP wrote: post #24
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…

Half the article is talking about scalable attacks on encryption. For example: "To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that 'on further inspection might not be optimal.'" I agree we should continue this arms race but…

> "To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that 'on further inspection might not be optimal.'"

That is true, but it's true for every attacker, not just the government, which changes the situation quite a bit. There is a very strong incentive for security experts to look very carefully at every patch to, say, OpenSSL. Few things are better marketing for a security firm than revealing a critical hole in security infrastructure.

In fact, the high price of such an exploit on the black market works in our favour as well. Tons of black-hats are looking for holes, and when they find and sell one, the subsequent exploitation is bound to raise some red flags and eventually point white-hats in the right direction.

Basically, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time"

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#46

Post by koralatov »

visarga wrote: post #26

Encryption is not absolutely safe because it relies on trusting in who's at the other end, but it surely is much better than using clear net. We can still trust a few entities, right? We need to collectively scrutinize and make informed guesses about who to trust. At the moment I set up TOR and use Starpage.COM instead of Google. Auto-delete cookies after closing the tabs and actively remove ads and tracking JS from…

That's a good idea, but it falls down the first time someone in the crowd starts downloading cp. Instead of having one, or a few, people being traced to their IP and investigated for cp, you now have 1,000 people under suspicion. You can protect users by ensuring that the box doesn't log any information about them, but then the box's admin is the one being held responsible.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#47

Post by Spooky23 »

I think the author is spot on, but not for the technical reasons given. As individuals, we don't share a need or desire for the type of operational discipline required to operate securely.

The US DoD/DISA publishes some of their documentation for how to operate iOS devices that access unclassified DoD networks (google for "ios stig"). It's inflexible -- no app store (except for internal, whitelisted app store), no music/etc, no iMessage, etc. They have a need to operate that way because even simple things like the physical location of personnel are potentially meaningful to adversaries. They also have the budget to do so.

I think that you need to scale up your security measures to meet your needs. If I were a political candidate running for a significant office, I'd demand a level of operational discipline to ensure that communication with key people was secure. Ditto if I were personally involved in some sort of extended litigation for attorney-client email.

Beyond that, what's the point? I could send pictures of my one-year old's birthday party to my mom with GPG. But why? And how would I expect my mom to handle that picture afterwards? Secrets (encrypted or not) are as strong as their weakest link -- I think that we all learned that lesson in high school.

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#48

Post by bigiain »

akie wrote: post #37
bigiain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly true - but in the Facebook example (and Twitter, and to a much lesser extent gmail and Skype) - the whole purpose of using the service for most people is to be at least partially "public". Facebook wouldn't work if every message was encrypted - at least not unless it was encrypted in such a way that a large number of nodes on your social graph can all decrypt them. If my ~250 Facebook friends or ~500 Tw…

You make two good points, but only the first one is structural. How do you keep information secure if it's meant to be semi-public? That's a rather fundamental question, and I don't have an answer to it. There must be a better way than storing everything in plain text in a centralized database, though. Just think about it: the current communication tools store all the world's communication in plain text databases on…

The Diaspora guys had some ideas – but they were either not good enough ideas or too difficult to execute on to gain much traction, from what I can see.

It's an interesting question – who's going to fund writing the software that effectively needs to replace Facebook while making it impossible to monetise in the ways Facebook can?

(Random half-baked ideas: what about something built on top of BitTorrentSync? A distributed encrypted file storage repo with sufficient storage/bandwidth on every users machine to store many encrypted blobs, some of which are encrypted using your public key. A client-side app that gives you a personal view of that data showing only the stuff meant for you. Work backwards from there to a Facebook or Twitter like service, with a whole bunch of strong crypto using PGP keypairs and self-signed TLS certs authenticated with your social graph's web of trust. It's almost certainly more difficult than that though - I feel like like this guy: http://xkcd.com/793/ – and we're now back at the "everyone just needs a PGP keypair" showstopper…)

Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution

#50

Post by yalogin »

Politics is the answer yes in an ideal world. But politics does not scale, encryption does. What I mean is its very tough for just one country to respect privacy in their laws. So if we want the world to do so will be impractical.
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