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posted by mrpg on Sunday February 18 2018, @11:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the double-speak dept.

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"


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 19 2018, @01:58AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday February 19 2018, @01:58AM (#639911)

    Thank you - I try not to spell things out too pedantically, it takes too long to read (and write.)

    IMO, the most powerful security is a combination of the best available algorithms plus obscurity. If the crackers don't know what they're dealing with, it will take actual (expensive) human brain power to try to break it, and unless you're a top priority target that's not likely to happen.

    What is likely to happen is a the cracking of a widely used tool (or app) and the subsequent mass harvesting of all traffic that passed through it - that will catch all kinds of people who weren't even on anyone's radar, until a mass harvester tripped on a few keywords in their archived communications streams from years gone by.

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