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This is the Enigma machine that enabled secret Nazi communications. Efforts to break that encoding system ultimately helped make D-Day possible.
[...] In terms of global politics, encryption was pretty straightforward during World War II. One nation tapped its linguists and mathematicians -- and relied on the heroism of men who boarded sinking U-boats -- to crack the encryption tech of an enemy force.
The world's gotten a lot more complicated since then.
Just as in World War II, law enforcement and spy agencies today try to read the communications of criminals, terrorists and spies. But now that almost everyone uses encryption, a government's ability to break it doesn't just worry our country's enemies -- it concerns us, too.
And despite the advances in computing and encryption since Bletchley Park, we haven't come close to agreeing on when it's okay to break encryption.
[...] Burr, who saw the inside of public controversies over the government breaking encryption during his time at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says there's no clear path forward.
"There's just a big dilemma there," he says. Creating ways to break encryption "will weaken the actual strength of your security against bad guys of ability. And you have to count among those the state actors and pretty sophisticated and organized criminals."
In their laser-focused effort to crack Nazi encryption, codebreakers like Turing and soldiers like Fasson and Grazier were unlikely to have imagined a world like this. But here it is: the catch-22 of computerized encryption. And it's not going away anytime soon.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @08:12AM (1 child)
Actually I'm also fine with the government trying to crack my crypto. I'm not fine with the government forbidding to use crypto they can't break, or intentionally introducing backdoors/weaknesses in crypto software/algorithms.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:40AM
Very healthy attitude. You know they are gonna try. And there ain't a thing anyone can do about it. So just plan on it.
To take any other approach would be like standing outside your freshly painted house and ordering the rain not to fall.
The government should count their blessings. At least many encrypted files are still sent out in the open.
I can guarantee you that should the government meddle in people's encryption, they will drive an interest in steganographic techniques. Now the least of their problems will be decryption. Once things are driven to steganographic covers, they will have fits trying to find the packages that something may or may not be hidden in.
Talking about a problem jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
They now have metadata on a lot of this stuff.
Once people are driven to use steganographic techniques, they won't even have that.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]