Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the ROT-13-is-too-secure dept.

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @07:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @07:50PM (#458621)

    User Al want's to setup an encrypted session to user Bob.
    The Govt agent George want's the ability to look into the session give permission from Judge Judy.
    To support this somebody we trust, Kim, sets up a set of Key servers.

    Kim creates a set of PKI key pairs and publishes the public keys K1..Kn.
    These keys are grouped into separate key servers so that each private key is only known of a few servers.

    Bob makes a PKI key pair and publishes the public key to Al.

    Al chooses a random session key and sends it to Bob using Bob's PKI.
    Al also includes an encrypted version of the session key encrypted with his choice of a subset of K1 through Kn.
    Al and Bob can talk using the session and George can watch the encrypted traffic.

    George gets permission to see the decrypted traffic from Judy.
    Judy tells servers K1 through Kn that this is ok.
    George looks at the key subset Al used to encrypt his access key and asks the proper Keyservers to decrypt the session key.
    The Key servers do this,but keep a good audit trail that George did this for this specific session.

    George can now see the traffic the Judy authorized and there is a good audit trail to make sure that this is all that happened.

    Good news:
    No new algorithm are required. The encryption algorithm is as good as it was before the backdoor was installed.

    Bad news:
    Only good guys and lazy or dumb bad guys can be expected to provide the access key.
    If some bad guy manages to get the private keys from the key servers, he can see all the traffic for the whole system.

    Moral, even with an algorithmically robust backdoor, the operations problems of keeping such powerful keys are overwhelming.
    It's wiser not to make such keys in the first place.