SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
At last, some of those who know more than most have publicly entered the fray regarding the establishment of governmental backdoors to encryption technologies. The New York Times published an article today which says:
An elite group of code makers and code breakers is taking American and British intelligence and law enforcement agencies to task in a new paper that evaluates government proposals to maintain special access to encrypted digital communications.
On Tuesday, the group — 13 of the world's pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists — released the paper, which concludes there is no viable technical solution that would allow the American and British governments to gain "exceptional access" to encrypted communications without putting the world's most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. [...]
The authors of the report said such fears did not justify putting the world's digital communications at risk. Given the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet, they argued, reducing encryption is not an option. Handing governments a key to encrypted communications would also require an extraordinary degree of trust.
One interesting issue they brought up relates to recent disturbing news:
With government agency breaches now the norm — most recently at the United States Office of Personnel Management, the State Department and the White House — the security specialists said authorities cannot be trusted to keep such keys safe from hackers and criminals.
Additional link of interest: the 34-page paper written by Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matthew Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Peter G. Neumann, Susan Landau, Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, and Daniel J. Weitzner.
takyon: Security gurus deliver coup de grace to US govt's encryption backdoor demands
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:33PM
Where does government get IT'S encryption from? Where does government get MOST of it's software from? From commercial developers, of course. So - they mandate that commercial developers have to put back doors into all encryption. Soon enough, much, if not all, of government will be using encryption with back doors in it.
Meanwhile, Russia, China, and other nations are busy building secure software.
One luck hacker can hand his own government the keys to US encryption - and there are no easy backdoors in the opposition's encryption.
Just plain brain dead.
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:18PM
Where does government get IT'S encryption from? . . . From commercial developers, of course.
Incorrect. When it's doing its real job, the NSA can and does create custom encryption solutions for the U.S government. The U.S. Military's encryption-enabled radios, for example, utilize an encryption scheme whose encoding, key distribution, and key rotation schedule are designed/specified/implemented by the NSA. Manufacturing of physical hardware is contracted out to commercial developers, but they don't need to hire mathematicians to perform the build.
In contrast, the NSA has claimed in testimony before Congress [nsa.gov] that it is the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States. Elsewhere on their website, the agency gives these job roles for mathematicians they hire:
Career Paths in Mathematics [nsa.gov]
NSA Mathematicians apply their skills to such tasks as:
* Designing and analyzing complex algorithms
* Expressing difficult cryptographic problems in terms of Mathematics
There is no need for the U.S. government to rely on private companies for development of new algorithms; their in-house staff and close ties to Academia guarantee that new methods will continue to be developed by civil servants and patriotic volunteers.
Convincing newly-minted Math graduates to apply for the job [forbes.com] is a different matter, and only tangentially relevant to the rest of this discussion :P
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]