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The EFF addresses some shortcomings in the recent report to policy makers by the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) on encryption.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a much-anticipated report yesterday that attempts to influence the encryption debate by proposing a "framework for decisionmakers." At best, the report is unhelpful. At worst, its framing makes the task of defending encryption harder.
The report collapses the question of whether the government should mandate "exceptional access" to the contents of encrypted communications with how the government could accomplish this mandate. We wish the report gave as much weight to the benefits of encryption and risks that exceptional access poses to everyone's civil liberties as it does to the needs—real and professed—of law enforcement and the intelligence community.
The report via the link in the quote above is available free of charge but holds several hoops to hop through between you and the final PDF. The EFF recognizes that the NAS report was undertaken in good faith, but identifies two main points of contention with the final product. Specifically, the framing is problematic and the discussion of the possible risks to civil liberties is quite brief.
Source : New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:44PM (3 children)
The problem with this is that a law that is able to ‘forbid’ encryption is equally capable of forbidding this approach. They simply update the screed to include “...or otherwise indecipherable...”. And with the stroke of a pen your technological solution to a political problem has been rendered ineffective. The solution is to argue on philosophical, political and logical grounds.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday February 18 2018, @11:27PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Monday February 19 2018, @01:13AM
There are no laws requiring backdoored crypto at the current time. If the government decides to pen some laws and you find a technologically exploitable loophole, you can be sure that at some time shortly beyond that, that the hole will be plugged (well, at least for anyone that isn't part of the 'ruling class').
It doesn't matter how they do it, or the exact wording. The problem is arguing along this line of reasoning is futile.
If they can somehow legally ban all encryption for communications and otherwise require broken and back-doored crypto for the masses, then it isn't a far stretch that they can subsequently also make it illegal to transmit random nonsensical data.
The real arguments here should be about the legality and ethics from a civil rights perspective, and other external side effects of making effective cryptography illegal. For example, the first and fourth amendments to the US Constitution have something to say about this. And traditionally it has been an assumed right for people to communicate privately. Then for side effects; every crime organisation and foreign government will soon end up with access to everyone's communications. And criminals will just continue to use effective crypto anyway, even if it has to be coupled with steganography, thus driving the problem into the dark.
I personally don't want to have to resort to steganography to send sensitive messages (eg. design details, or pricing structures, etc) to clients to avoid rival organisation(s) (or governments) from intercepting and deciphering my messages. And for some channels of R&D and otherwise valuable information, there are big financial incentives to obtain access. Imagine the enormous monetary (and political) value of escrow keys, or back door access to a government security key database. With rewards like that, it's only a matter of time before the 'wrong' people have access.
And by definition, for me the 'wrong' people are everyone besides the intended recipient(s).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @02:14AM
So Trump gets arrested for covfefe? And kids get interrogated by the FBI because agents can't understand the new lingo? People who can't spell get sent to prison?