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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, @07:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @07:15PM (#522751)

    Ernst Stavro Blofeld had his fingers into everything.