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from the trust-us-we're-the-government dept.
The Washington Post has a story which says:
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on Tuesday renewed a call for tech companies to help law enforcement officials gain access to encrypted smartphones, describing it as a "major public safety issue."
Wray said the bureau was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices in fiscal 2017 — more than half of all the smartphones it tried to crack in that time period — despite having a warrant from a judge.
"Being unable to access nearly 7,800 devices in a single year is a major public safety issue," he said, taking up a theme that was a signature issue of his predecessor, James B. Comey.
Wray was then quoted as saying:
"We're not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens," he said in New York at Fordham University's International Conference on Cyber Security. "We're interested in those devices that have been used to plan or execute terrorist or criminal activities."
He then went on to promote the long-disparaged idea of key escrow:
As an example of a possible compromise, Wray cited a case from New York several years ago. Four major banks, he said, were using a chat messaging platform called Symphony, which was marketed as offering "guaranteed data deletion." State financial regulators became concerned that the chat platform would hamper investigations of Wall Street.
"In response," Wray said, "the four banks reached an agreement with the regulators to ensure responsible use" of Symphony. They agreed to keep a copy of their communications sent through the app for seven years and to store duplicate copies of their encryption keys with independent custodians not controlled by the banks, he said.
To me this is more of the utter nonsense the government has spouted. When will they understand that key escrow only works when one trusts the government and the keeper of the keys?
Previously:
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:33AM (11 children)
News flash: You're guilty.
If even one partial sentence can be decrypted out of that message, you'd go to jail for encrypting a message. Remember there are large numbers of possible decryption of a message, depending on what algorithm you used. I'm sure they will choose a good algorithm to decrypt the random bits.
There will come a time when it is safer to say something intelligible, with meaning obscured by actual words and phrases.
Maybe we need an encryption method that reads as clear text, not totally disjoint collections of words, or song lyrics, and religious rantings. With the real message buried somewhere in the drivel.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dr Spin on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:45AM (4 children)
Are you implying that there is a sane message underpinning one or two of Trump's tweets?
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:49AM (3 children)
The Trump Rosetta Stone is carved onto Bannon's inner thigh.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @10:25AM (1 child)
No, it's Rosie O'Donnell's thighs you should check.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @04:58PM
Unfortunately those have been worn smooth.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 10 2018, @07:35PM
The Trump Rosetta Stone is carved onto Bannon's inner thigh.
That must have been where he stored the word to the national anthem, too!
What an unfortunate parting of ways.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:23AM (2 children)
If using a one-time pad, *every* sentence and its opposite can be "decrypted" from the random data (more exactly, everything of the same length is a possible decryption).
"So you say he sent an encrypted message. How do you know?"
"We've decrypted a sentence, it says 'kill them'"
"How did you decrypt it?"
"We just flipped some bits so that the message appeared."
"You flipped bits?"
"Yes, about half of them."
"Any pattern in the bits?"
"No. But you wouldn't expect that from a one-time pad encrypted message."
"Ah, but then, couldn't you always change some bits to get that message?"
"Errr … yes, sure."
"And if starting with random data, how many bits would you have to switch?"
"About half of them."
"In any specific pattern?"
"No."
"The defence has no more questions."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:45AM (1 child)
This relies on an intelligent and informed jury. Most would only hear that as technobabble.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:30PM
If your lawyer is smart enough, and you have enough money to pay him, he will hire an erudite expert witness to make it sound appropriately absurd.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 10 2018, @05:57PM (1 child)
Steganography is difficult even in jpegs, embedding it in text would require you to transmit entire volumes, at least if you wanted it to be hard to detect once suspected. Just imagine, e.g., trying to compose a message where the real message was carried by every "skip to the next prime number smaller than 1024 recycling"-th letter. Traditional methods like the initial letters of lines or only read the capitalized letters are hard enough to write, but relatively easy to decode (because they're expected).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @08:42PM
You're thinking too hard. If you have to communicate clandestinely, you use codes, and not stenography. The presence of a single word at the correct time or in the correct place, and the message is passed without reasonable possibility of suspicion. If you have to encrypt a detailed message that would break your codes, you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday January 10 2018, @10:02PM
How many printable ASCII characters in a row making up a fragment of an English word would count?
Some English words only have one letter.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].