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posted by martyb on Sunday September 01 2019, @07:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the Seckret-Codez dept.

Bruce Schneier has written a short piece over at Lawfare in response to ongoing calls to weaken encryption. Unlike during the cold war there is no longer a distinction between consumer grade encryption and military encryption. This is because customized encryption is both more expensive and less secure, because it is unique, non-standard, and untested.

In his keynote address at the International Conference on Cybersecurity, Attorney General William Barr argued that companies should weaken encryption systems to gain access to consumer devices for criminal investigations. Barr repeated a common fallacy about a difference between military-grade encryption and consumer encryption: "After all, we are not talking about protecting the nation's nuclear launch codes. Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications."

The thing is, that distinction between military and consumer products largely doesn't exist. All of those "consumer products" Barr wants access to are used by government officials—heads of state, legislators, judges, military commanders and everyone else—worldwide. They're used by election officials, police at all levels, nuclear power plant operators, CEOs and human rights activists. They're critical to national security as well as personal security.

Earlier on SN:
U.S. Attorney General William Barr Demands Backdoored Encryption (2019)
FBI: End-to-End Encryption Problem "Infects" Law Enforcement and Intelligence Community (2019)
The Crypto Warrior--Why Politicians Want a ‘Back Door’ into Your Devices—and Why it Will Never Work (2016)


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  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday September 01 2019, @01:15PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 01 2019, @01:15PM (#888463) Journal

    Quantum computing might break RSA, might even break every known public key method, but there's still symmetric encryption.

    Nevertheless, whoever masters quantum computing first might just achieve the ability to create codes that are unbreakable without quantum computing and could, conceivably, create the condition where one nation believes its codes are uncrackable and thus repeats the same mistakes as in WW2.

    I've got no idea of what progress the Russians and Chinese are making in this area, and they are unlikely to tell us and will try to prevent us from finding out.

    Now, if we could just break their codes ...

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