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Like other politicians and government officials, President Trump's nominee for the position of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, wants to have it both ways when it comes to encryption:
At his confirmation hearing, Sessions was largely non-committal. But in his written responses to questions posed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, however, he took a much clearer position:
Question: Do you agree with NSA Director Rogers, Secretary of Defense Carter, and other national security experts that strong encryption helps protect this country from cyberattack and is beneficial to the American people's' digital security?
Response: Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes. It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national-security and criminal investigations.
Despite Sessions' "on the one hand, on the other" phrasing, this answer is a clear endorsement of backdooring the security we all rely on. It's simply not feasible for encryption to serve what Sessions concedes are its "many valuable and important purposes" and still be "overcome" when the government wants access to plaintext. As we saw last year with Sens. Burr and Feinstein's draft Compliance with Court Orders Act, the only way to give the government this kind of access is to break the Internet and outlaw industry best practices, and even then it would only reach the minority of encryption products made in the USA.
Related: Presidential Candidates' Tech Stances: Not Great
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday January 25 2017, @12:27PM
Sounds like the same argument DVD_CCA thought when creating DVD movie encryption. Anyone remember how that one turned out?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 25 2017, @01:13PM
It's not quite the same. The problem with encryption for DRM is that encryption assumes two cooperating parties and one or more adversaries, but in DRM one of the cooperating parties is also the adversary. They have to be in the state of both having the key (to access the content) and not having the key (for the DRM to be secure). The only way that this can be made to work is if the user doesn't control their own playback device and is not able / allowed to reverse engineer it.
With encryption, if you want the government to be able to break it, then you must either make it weak enough that government-owned computers can break it (difficult to do if you don't also want to be able to let other people break it, especially for something that has a lifetime of years) or you have to use a more complicated cryptosystem where there are two decryption keys, one used by the intended recipient and one held by the company. Or you can make the system insecure, but not the crypto by allowing remote logins that can access the plaintext, again secured by a key held by the author of the software.
The first problem with all of these approaches is that they rely on the organisation that controls the master key being able to store it securely in such a way that no one is able to infiltrate the company and exfiltrate the key, externally compromise the systems that store the key, or simply work out what the key is based on flaws in the crypto implementation.
The other flaw with this approach is that it assumes that all communication systems come from big companies and are black boxes. Even with traditional mail, there's nothing that you can do to stop two people exchanging a one-time pad in person and then sending completely secure letters to each other through the post. With encryption systems, there are thousands of off-the-shelf open source solutions and even books that contain source code listings for implementing algorithms that, with a sensible key length, are well beyond the ability of any government agency to crack. Gun advocates like to claim that if guns are outlawed then only outlaws will have guns. The analogy would be equivalent for encryption, if there were gun stalls on every street that would hand out free guns to anyone who walked past and most businesses depended on armed guards.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 25 2017, @05:34PM
Well one thing I think you're missing is that, just like with DRM where reverse-engineering can be simply banned, with mandated backdoored encryption, the use of unapproved encryption can be banned. Sure, you can say that "only criminals" will use it, but with ubiquitous surveillance, it wouldn't be that hard for the government to monitor communications and make sure they're using one of the approved encryption services. It wouldn't be perfect; someone could of course resort to steganography or something and send people big JPEGs with short, simple messages hidden in them, or the like, but if you want to exchange serious amounts of data, it's going to be hard to hide that from the enforcers using automated systems.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:38PM
USB drives, SD cards, or something custom-built, hidden in a toy (something with electronics), sent by mail.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:54AM
The only way to tell if encrypted traffic is government-approved encrypted traffic is to decrypt a large enough sample that you can tell. Even then, there are cryptosystems that give two different real-seeming plaintexts depending on the key that you use, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to put together something that produced a plausible looking stream of words for the NSA but the real message for the intended recipient. It wouldn't stand up to human inspection, but by the time that they've focused on you as a target then you're past the point where having them know that you're using encryption is a problem.
Even then, you're ignoring how effective modern steganography is. For example, linguistic steganography works by taking a known passage and permuting typos and punctuation to encode a message. You can take, for example, the GN?? troll, and post minor variations of it on Slashdot. Each one encodes a message, but unless you know the meaning of the permutations you have no way of distinguishing it from various mechanisms for trying to get past spam filters. Or you can take a generic spam and send it to a million people, including the intended recipient. Traffic analysis won't help the adversary identify the recipient because, in both cases, it goes to a load of people who aren't the intended recipient, and they all ignore it as spam. If you're serious about evading the government, this is quite easy to do, so all this kind of law would do is make legitimate financial transactions less secure.
Amusingly, the original version of this post did not redact GN?? and so triggered the spam filter here.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 25 2017, @01:28PM
Or, more to the point, it basically adds up to "anything the (supposed) Good Guys can use, the Bad Guys can use too". It's just like how if you keep a key to your house under the potted plant in your backyard, a burglar can look there too, find the key, and get right in.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday January 25 2017, @01:50PM
We shouldn't assume those working for the government are necessarily good guys, either. There are often bad people working for the government (especially intelligence agencies and the like) and sometimes there is even an systemic effort to suppress certain groups of people (such as journalists, activists, whistleblowers, etc.). Given all the atrocities the US government has committed, it would be foolish to think of it as a good guy that can be trusted with our secrets.
But even if I assume that the government can be trusted and that they can provide adequate security now and in the future, surrendering everyone's liberties in exchange for security is a cowardly act. If one person wants to make the personal decision to surrender their ability to use strong encryption, then fine, but leave me out of it.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 25 2017, @02:12PM
That's why I said "(supposed) Good Guys". You obviously leave that out when talking to Sessions and people who think like him, because authoritarians think only in terms of "we're the Good Guys, everyone else is the Bad Guys".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @04:35PM
It is quite funny. Obama and his team built the current system up over what they inherited, and that was OK. Obama's people also called for backdoors, and that was OK by most of the left as well. But a few days after the new team takes over, and the system they inherited is now ultimate evil, and folks on the new team saying the same things as the old team are cause for panic (and buying copies of 1984).
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday January 25 2017, @04:44PM
That's strange, because I seem to recall countless criticisms of Obama and his cohorts over the issue of the surveillance state. There was certainly a lot of discussion about it on this website. Partisan hacks are nothing new and exist on both sides, so what are you even referring to?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @05:14PM
But but libruls are evil!
I'll bet this whole thing is fake news spread by libruls! Trump is going to make sure we have fantastic encryption! The best encryption!
Trump! Trump! Trump!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 25 2017, @06:16PM
Obama Won’t Seek Access to Encrypted User Data [nytimes.com]
The Obama administration has backed down in its bitter dispute with Silicon Valley over the encryption of data on iPhones and other digital devices, concluding that it is not possible to give American law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to that information without also creating an opening that China, Russia, cybercriminals and terrorists could exploit.
The fact that they actually made the right call helps...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:58AM
They are all pro-surveillance.
This should not in any way be a partisan issue, it is US (the people) versus THEM (the politicians and their authoritarian backers of various stripes and creeds.)
We need to remind them who is in charge and stop acting like livestock for them to do as they please.
And people need to stop whining about liberals or conservatives and allowing them to divide us over the stupid parts of each side's ideology, rather than uniting over the common pieces neither side SUPPOSEDLY wants infringed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 25 2017, @05:08PM
I've been consistently critical of the surveillance state, regardless of who's in charge of it. And I'm certainly not alone in that.
I agree that partisan hackery exists, on all sides, but there is such a thing as ideological consistency. Basically, scratch somebody who works specifically in politics (whether professionally or not), and you'll find a lot of partisan hacks. Go for anybody else, and you'll find that while they often favor one party over another, they're much less partisan hacks.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday January 25 2017, @01:54PM
I'd say it's more akin to allowing johnny law to have a skeleton key to every lock "just in case". Once that key is discovered and copied, it's all over and there is no going back. A free for all will ensue.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darnkitten on Wednesday January 25 2017, @05:41PM
Already have 'em... [knoxbox.com]
They're intended for fire departments, but...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 27 2017, @12:53AM
1) They're not on every lock. They're on apartments and office buildings which voluntarily decided to grant that access. I have no problem with the government having a program where I can voluntarily submit my encryption key. I wouldn't, but they're free to provide a drop box for 'em.
2) It's not a single master key, it's a different key for every local fire department. Much less risk. But of course, you can't really do that with crypto as it isn't tied to a physical location.
3) I believe most building codes specify that your front door has to be weak enough that the fire department can break it down. In the commercial buildings where these things are installed, the doors are often glass. So if they didn't have these keys they'd just use "brute force" and break through the door, which would probably be *faster* than using the key anyway. So unlike crypto keys, physical keys don't actually offer much protection to begin with.
4) Those boxes should be installed so they trip the building alarms when opened. In a fire, it doesn't matter, because the alarm is already going off. If you open one to try to break in when there ISN'T a fire, you're going to have the whole damn building coming towards you wondering what the hell is going on.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday January 25 2017, @07:00PM
Here, you can 3d print TSA master keys: https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys [github.com]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday January 25 2017, @05:45PM
Protip: You keep the encryption key secret by wearing the t-shirt inside out. That's how.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:11PM
Cover it with a white sheet. [independent.co.uk]