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Riana Pfefferkorn, a Cryptography Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, has published a whitepaper on the risks of so-called "responsible encryption". This refers to inclusion of a mechanism for exceptional access by law enforcement to the cleartext content of encrypted messages. It also goes by the names "back door", "key escrow", and "golden key".
Federal law enforcement officials in the United States have recently renewed their periodic demands for legislation to regulate encryption. While they offer few technical specifics, their general proposal—that vendors must retain the ability to decrypt for law enforcement the devices they manufacture or communications their services transmit—presents intractable problems that would-be regulators must not ignore.
However, with all that said, a lot more is said than done. Some others would make the case that active participation is needed in the democratic process by people knowledgeable in use of actual ICT. As RMS has many times pointed out much to the chagrin of more than a few geeks, "geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." Again, participation is needed rather than ceding the whole process, and thus its outcome, to the loonies.
Source : New Paper on The Risks of "Responsible Encryption"
Related:
EFF : New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions
Great, Now There's "Responsible Encryption"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:34PM (2 children)
Encryption for dummies
There are only two states:
1 - It works
2 - It does not work
p.s.:
"Responsible Encryption", "back door", "key escrow", "golden key", etc.. all fall in the second case
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:56PM
Odd that this is modded insightful. Encryption is actually graded based on time/effort required to break it, its effectiveness scale is far from binary. To the point of OP, however, "responsible" or "backdoored" encryption basically has a zero time/effort required for it to be broken by anyone who has access to the backdoor key, so would fall pretty close to the "doesn't work" category, if you care about keeping your secrets from anyone who might have backdoor access.
On the other end of the spectrum, strong encryption takes a lot of effort / long time to break - but, as long as the message can be read by the intended recipients, there is the possibility that it will also be read by unintended persons.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @02:05AM
1 - Encryption in which the government already has a backdoor.
2 - Encryption in which the government wants to install a backdoor.