SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Riana Pfefferkorn, a Cryptography Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, has published a whitepaper on the risks of so-called "responsible encryption". This refers to inclusion of a mechanism for exceptional access by law enforcement to the cleartext content of encrypted messages. It also goes by the names "back door", "key escrow", and "golden key".
Federal law enforcement officials in the United States have recently renewed their periodic demands for legislation to regulate encryption. While they offer few technical specifics, their general proposal—that vendors must retain the ability to decrypt for law enforcement the devices they manufacture or communications their services transmit—presents intractable problems that would-be regulators must not ignore.
However, with all that said, a lot more is said than done. Some others would make the case that active participation is needed in the democratic process by people knowledgeable in use of actual ICT. As RMS has many times pointed out much to the chagrin of more than a few geeks, "geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." Again, participation is needed rather than ceding the whole process, and thus its outcome, to the loonies.
Source : New Paper on The Risks of "Responsible Encryption"
Related:
EFF : New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions
Great, Now There's "Responsible Encryption"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 19 2018, @01:09PM (5 children)
Data in-flight should be relatively easy to disguise. That non-standard encrypting communication app on your cellphone (after your phone has been confiscated and searched) not so much.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday February 19 2018, @02:39PM (4 children)
Right, but it's data-in-flight that we're talking about. I don't buy anyone using non-conforming crypto will stick out and be easily detected, and will be very suspicious.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 19 2018, @03:41PM (3 children)
Well, this is where the "responsible crypto" debate comes into play:
if 99%+ of encrypted data-in-flight is "responsible crypto" then a trawler with the backdoor key can open all of that data-in-flight easily and then the remaining stuff becomes suspicious.
It's a much better situation (for anonymity and privacy) where data-in-flight is heterogeneous and hard to break...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @08:23PM (2 children)
Yup, I haven't kept up enough with the crypto scene, but from what I recall even some of the most heavy duty crypto can be brute forced with enough supercomputing resources. Might take a few days or even longer, but at least that makes it impractical to decrypt everything. Thus you get the push for backdoors, that way sifting through all encrypted data becomes easy and you can prioritize resources for decrypting the messages using "illegal" crypto.
It is an arms race that law enforcement simply can not win, and the fight to control humanity results in less freedom for the general public. Even with full access to digital communication the "bad guys" will quickly learn to use methods that make backdoored crypto pointless. Code words, book ciphers, isolated terrorist cells, etc. The only people this is likely to protect us against are the dumb fucks radicalized by the FBI who wouldn't have been a real threat without all the prodding.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:27AM
Nothing breaks a good one-time-pad - not quantum, not the NSA farm outside Langley, or Bumblefarm, or any of them.
Key management is the key. When used properly, Mersenne Twister is a good one-time-pad that is 2^19937 bits long. If you can secretly pass a 2.5KByte key that puts you somewhere specific in that 2^19937 sequence, and scramble up your message so it looks random before applying the pad, then we're done. (If you foolishly try to encrypt a bunch of zeroes with MT as your pad, then it can be broken.)
Moreover, if the crackers just don't know _how_ you're using MT as a OTP, that increases the complexity of an already intractable problem by many additional orders of magnitude.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:27PM
No. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
It is a practical impossibility to brute-force good crypto. Supercomputers don't help. Custom silicon doesn't help. Patience doesn't help. If you find a critical bug in OpenSSH, or outdo the world's algorithmists and find an efficient algorithm to crack AES256 (the complexity theoretic consequences would be profound), or take a wrench to the guy who knows the password, or maybe if you invent a quantum computer (but even then, maybe not) then you've got a chance, but brute-force isn't on the table.