The Australian Government believes that it needs a golden key to backdoor encryption within Australia via legislation. The Brits and the Yanks have both already had a nudge at this and both have conceded that requiring a backdoor to encryption is not viable but this will not stop the Australian Liberal Party from trying.
Digital rights experts have described the proposal as "ludicrous" as Cyber security minister Angus Taylor stating that the legislation would be presented for public comment within the next quarter. While the Australian Government has not detailed how it expects to gain access to encrypted data, companies may be penalized if they don't kowtow to the new laws. There is nothing to be discussed here that hasn't been said before other than the Australian Government sincerely believes it can force companies to divulge encrypted data to authorities on demand.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @11:43AM (4 children)
If they get their wish, it will be only a few hours, a day at most, before the intelligence agencies of the rest of the world get the “golden key” to Australia, and then give it up to a fortnight or so before the blackhat underground has it too. And then there will be a wave of cybercrime on the entire country such that no one will be able to do anything online without getting hacked. Creating a “golden key" like this will basically place the nation's electronic security hostage to it, making it an extremely valuable target. Far better not to have such a juicy secret like that in the first place: it might make law enforcement’s job easier for a brief time, right until the day the secret gets out, and it WILL get out.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday June 18 2018, @12:36PM (3 children)
Yes, but... they're stupid. :)
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 18 2018, @01:59PM
Well, next up, do you think we can get them to legislate less gravity? With all the fat people in the world, less gravity would be very helpful. I dunno, maybe reduce it to 70% or something like that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @11:03PM
Now now the "MyHealthRecord" system is a good idea but forcing it on everyone and uploading their medical records online isn't
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @10:42AM
If they are smart they could do what Lotus Notes did: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html [cypherspace.org]
Basically all messages are encrypted by a random symmetric key.
The entire symmetric key is encrypted by the recipient's public key so that whoever has the recipient's private key can decrypt and get the whole symmetric key.
X bits of the symmetric key are encrypted by the NSA's public key so that whoever has the NSA's private key can decrypt and get X bits of the symmetric key, then with the NSA's computing resources and other techniques they can determine the rest of the bits and the message.
Yeah maybe people can reverse the private key from the known public key by now but I'm sure it took longer than a fortnight for the blackhat underground to get the NSA's private key... ;)