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posted by n1 on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the learning-from-history dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:19PM (#522684)

    If it is a room only you have access to (including peeping-through-the-window access, of course), the post-it on the monitor may be a safer place for the password than your head which is routinely carried out of the building and may be susceptible to hacking methods involving a $5 wrench.

  • (Score: 2) by Lester on Friday June 09 2017, @11:23AM

    by Lester (6231) on Friday June 09 2017, @11:23AM (#523005) Journal

    Just wanted to tell that if you don't follow the most elemental security basics, strong encryption won't help you much.

    , the post-it on the monitor may be a safer place

    With the same effort, you can keep it a draw of your desk hidden in a bunch of papers that none but you can find.

    And, well, a place that invest in a safe room to secure a workstation, I expect them to follow better security policies that a post-it.

    may be susceptible to hacking methods involving a $5 wrench.

    A little more than $5, to begin with, you must know who knows the password, where he live and know his habits to find meet him in a solitary place.