UK Home Secretary Calls Tech Leaders 'Patronizing' For Refusing To Believe Her 'Safe Backdoors' Spiels
from the if-you-don't-want-to-be-treated-like-a-petulant-child... dept
It appears we're headed towards some sort of encryption showdown in the UK. The only question is: what sort of weapons will everyone be bringing to the brawl?
Home Secretary Amber Rudd is giving off the vibe the UK government may soon be wielding mandates and legislation, if not literal slings and arrows. The more Rudd (and other top UK politicians) argue for encryption backdoors they insist aren't backdoors, the more they're running into opposition from those expected to create the backdoors.
Rudd's finding out ignorance isn't bliss.
Asked by an audience member if she understood how end-to-end encryption actually worked, she said: "It's so easy to be patronised in this business. We will do our best to understand it.
"We will take advice from other people but I do feel that there is a sea of criticism for any of us who try and legislate in new areas, who will automatically be sneered at and laughed at for not getting it right."
She added: "I don't need to understand how encryption works to understand how it's helping - end-to-end encryption - the criminals.
"I will engage with the security services to find the best way to combat that."
To be sure, Rudd is taking additional criticism. But it's not for her ignorance. It's for her obstinance. Her ignorance of encryption fundamentals allows her to continue claiming there's such a thing as a secure backdoor. She may understand what end-to-end encryption means, but insists it can be subverted without destroying it.
Understandably, tech companies have attempted to set the record straight repeatedly, using actual facts. That's what Rudd views as "patronising." Facts. And people who do understand encryption attempting to explain the facts to someone who views facts as inconvenient barriers to lawful access.
Rudd does know this: terrorists are using encrypted apps to communicate. What's not being considered is the security of millions of non-terrorists using the same encrypted apps. So, she's obviously frustrated and lashing out at those companies she views as taking the side of terrorists.
But what she wants are things tech companies can't provide without sacrificing the security of millions of non-terrorists..
She insisted she does not want "back doors" installed in encryption codes, something the industry has warned will weaken security for all users, nor did she want to ban encryption, just to allow easier access by police and the security services.
If she's angry, the tech companies she refuses to listen to are just as fed up. That's when the snark kicks in: when all other more reasonable lines of communication have been ignored.
At this point, it's gone beyond simple facts and science. The war on encryption has shifted to a religious crusade.
She told the meeting Silicon Valley had a "moral" obligation to do more to help the fight against crime and terrorism.
Counterpoint: the government has lots of moral obligations as well, but seldom lives up to those. But beyond that, no company has a "moral" obligation to cave to government demands for weakened user security. Companies are doing what they can to assist law enforcement and are heavily engaged in moderating content uploaded to their platforms. Insisting this is a "moral" issue warps the conversation, taking it past a discussion of what is or isn't possible and into the realm of wonders and miracles.
If Rudd doesn't like being talked down to by tech leaders, perhaps she should start listening to what they're saying. More importantly, she needs to start accepting their answers.
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Filed Under: amber rudd, encryption, going dark, uk
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Appropriate
If you don't want to be 'patronized', don't act like a toddler.Subscribe: RSS
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And how does she think it can be done? I mean, she's asking the experts and they are saying there's no way of doing this so what does she propose? Does she have some super-hyper-experts that can do better than actual experts from all around (read: magicians) and are hiding it? Ask her that question.
"Ms Rudd, despite having created awesome security systems and/or companies that are worth hundreds of billions we don't know how to provide encryption that's easier to access by law enforcement that won't be as easier to the crooks. We are dumbasses so please enlighten us from the top of your marvelous wisdom!"
No seriously. Throw the ball in her lap. If she actually takes it and manages to give birth to some system then quickly compromise it to show her she is an idiot. Sure a lot of taxpaying money will be wasted but at the very least you drive the point home: there's no such a thing as 'encryption that can be more easily accessed by law enforcement' that isn't effectively 'no encryption at all'.
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Safe Backdoors
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Call Harry Potter
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Yes, that is generally how the term is deployed these days, sadly enough.
Proper response: "we'll create an encryption backdoor that can only be used by legitimate authorities to target bad guys the day after you create a gun that operates on those same principles."
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Not a good track record on locking/breaking
Facial Recognition: Broken with a photograph;
Denuvo "uncrackable" DRM: Broken in Months, then Weeks, then Days, now Hours;
User-Only Gun - Broken with a Magnet;
High-Security bike lock - Broken with a Bic Pen barrel;
So, I predict:
"Government Only Backdoor" - Broken prior to arrival.
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Tech companies are making their case at a rational/intellectual level. ("math doesn't work that way....")
Basic psychology says that Rudd _will_ win eventually, unless the Tech companies can come up with an equally compelling emotional argument.
This is pretty much the same tactic that put Trump in the White House.
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Not only is the encryption genie out of the bottle, but the bottle is broken so it cannot be captured again.
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I don't understand.
autosplain
hamstring sprain
ouch
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crypto fans are being disingenuous
For example, when you use Messages on an iPhone, you are trusting Apple to add only keys for the parties in the conversation. It would be easy for them to insert an additional key. No mathematics are violated and the encryption isn't weakened. Adding another key isn't a backdoor, it's an additional front door.
The government can demand telecom companies provide access to law enforcement. It's not a huge stretch to say handset makers should do the same.
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Was it also mansplaining when Techdirt was condescending of Max Hill, Christopher Wray and James Comey, George Brandis and Malcolm Turnbull, and many others (mostly men) for not listening to tech experts about this exact same issue?
I'm generally sympathetic to suggestions that when a woman is talked down to, some of that condescension may be due to sexism. However, I think that the general tenor of this post (and previous Techdirt coverage of the "Going Dark" issue) tends to be "Tech advisors are becoming increasingly condescending because politicians aren't listening to them, simply because the answers they're giving don't line up with what the politicians want to hear," rather than "Tech advisors are becoming increasingly condescending to women because they think that tech is too much of a men's issue that women can't understand."
If I'm wrong, please, tell me: show me where this post says that the secretary's inability to understand has anything to do with her gender, or, by comparing this post to any of the other "Going Dark" posts listed above, show me how Ms Rudd is being treated any differently then the men making similar assertions have been.
Women shouldn't be thought of as being less capable of understanding any given issue than a man would be, but they no one, regardless of gender, should be given a free pass from criticism when they clearly don't understand that issue.
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techsplain? how is this essentially male centric?
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Just because bad guys can use scramblers to encrypt voice calls placed over landlines to foil eavesdroppers doesn't mean wiretaps have no value to law enforcement.
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Mansplaining = a man explaining a subject to a woman with the assumption that she is less capable of understanding it than he is because she is a woman.
The prototypical example is the case brought up by [Rebecca Solnit] (http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/13/opinion/op-solnit13) (although she did not use the term), of a man who tried to explain the content of a book to her, ignoring her repeated protest that she didn't need the book explained to her as she was its author.
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If it's not a Backdoor she wants, then what? The only thing left is MAGIC.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Everyone (with the required technical acumen) acknowledges that what you describe can easily be done.
However, this is still considered to be weakening encryption, because all it takes is one bad actor to get a hold of that "additional key" and every iPhone Message ever sent with that key is now compromised. And, given the number of requests there will be for that key, and therefore the number of people who would lay eyes on the key, it would inevitably be leaked. "Three can keep a secret if two are dead," and all that.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Right, just add another key.
Who has that key? The government? Which government? The UK government? China? Iran? North Korea?
The answer is, all of the above.
Ooh, Ooh, I can hear it now, ooh ooh, each government gets their own key!
Which means that if ANY government leaks their key, anyone can access any communication.
What you're positing is the TSA Key, which they leaked in a freaking photograph on the front page of a national freaking paper. What happens when they leak the key in a photo because it's written on a black board in the background at a security conference?
Go sit in a corner and think about how stupid that suggestion is.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
But then you had to open your huge, ignorant mouth and speak nonsense while expecting us to pay attention to you.
Sit down. Shut up. And learn, if you can manage that -- which I doubt -- from those who are superior to you. If you can't or won't learn, then at least stay seated and silent so that you don't contaminate our discourse with your filth.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Well, yes, what the government *actually* wants (an end to effective privacy) can be accomplished with policy changes.
What the government *claims* to want (a good-guys-only access point that does not otherwise compromise privacy) cannot.
Since the government cannot, for obvious reasons, admit to the former as their real agenda in public, they are forced to make asses of themselves by pretending that the latter can be accomplished by nerding harder.
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I can see how unattractive Amber Rudd actually is.
I can see how NO-ONE would ever want to break her backdoors in......
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Only *millions*
LOL only millions. LOL I wish.
Multiply that by 1,000 and you'll be closer to the actual number.
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Almost agree with you, Tim
She talks about "tech companies" (presumably companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc.). What she fails to understand is that NONE of the so-called "tech companies" roll their own encryption. They used tried and trusted methods and code developed by cryptographers. The "tech companies" have no more ability to modify -- in a secure way -- the encryption they are using than anyone else would.
The real hoot is that the "tech companies" are prevented from using anything other than tried and trusted encryption because, if they did, they wouldn't qualify for FIPS certification which means they couldn't sell it to the government -- the U.S. as well as all others.
Tim, with all due respect, I submit to you that Ms. Rudd is a moron (note: I said that, not Rex Tillerson).
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Appropriate
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Then it is appropriate to tell her to bugger off.
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And yeah, only criminals can bypass the biometric sensors.
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This is the patronizing attitude that people in power can slip into when dealing with those from a circle of less influence.
I've been the victim of the "mansplain" a few times, sometimes by a woman, always someone who felt they were talking from a position of superiority. Usually I'd just play dumb and then ask them a question based on the concepts they had so plainly failed to grasp. That's left a few floundering, and once or twice this was completely missed by the splainer -- at which point I know that having any sort of a meaningful conversation or learning experience is totally impossible.
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Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
If the government loses control of that key (like they did with the physical TSA key), then that message (or messages) from that one user can now be decrypted. Every other message sent by that user and all other users is still protected.
It's not much different than when they put a wiretap on a landline. They could lose those tapes, but all the other conversations are still private.
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It does nothing for the second part, about only shooting bad guys.
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Re: Safe Backdoors
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The idea of "mansplaining" is that there's a certain subcategory of men that believe that women are intrinsically less competent, and thus this behaviour happens more often when a man is trying to explain something to a woman rather than in any other kind of interaction.
I'm a man myself, and thus can't speak directly to how often it happens to women, but given how I've seen and heard other men talk, write, etc. about women, I'm sure that subcategory exists, and I have little problem believing that it's as large as women claim that it is.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
An additional “door” gives hackers an additional opportunity to crack encryption. Where you put this metaphorical door does not change that fact.
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Except that it appears, as was noted in the tfa, that Rudd is willfully ignorant, and revels in that ignorance as it gives her free reign to demand impossible things, without the pain of the headache that would cause to someone that actually understands the subject. She flatly refuses to educate herself, on the basis that no matter what she learns, she will still "believe" that slightly compromised encryption is ok, when everyone that knows anything about encryption is shouting at her that there is NO SUCH THING as slightly compromised encryption.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Average number of iMessages sent per year: 63,000,000,000,000,000.
Current secure key storage size: 2048 bits (256 bytes)
That's 1,600,000,000,000,000 bytes of information per year.
Would you care to put up the cash for the 1.6 petabytes of storage that your suggestion would take (not counting the necessary metadata needed to tie the key to the message)?
Oh, and don't forget that you have just shifted the one thing you would need to decrypt all messages from "the master decryption key" to "access to the database of decryption keys." Unless you really trust Apple to keep those keys secure (as much as you'd trust, say, Yahoo!, Equifax, eBay, Target, Evernote, FriendFinder, SnapChat, the Turkish government...)
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Who would get to define how quick that new key lasts—the device manufacturer, the software developer, the end user, or the government?
What assurances can any of those entities offer that those keys could not be intercepted and used to eventually crack the encryption?
What makes having two keys and two doors—two methods for potentially cracking encryption—safer than one?
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Govt A: I want to decrypt this message.
Apple: <dumps a quintillion keys labeled "Govt A" on the floor> Here ya go, good luck.
Govt A: ...
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Her appearance is not germane to this conversation in any way. Please fuck off to some other slime-covered corner of the Internet and stay there.
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Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Be nice, until it is time to stop being nice—then destroy them.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
That would mean acquiring keys from or sending to a central key registry. Also, that means tagging the message with an identifier for the government key. That registry would be a very valuable target for the bad guys and other governments to compromise. Such an approach also destroys perfect forward secrecy, because a key that can decrypt messages is kept beyond the life of the messages. (Hint, such keys are useless unless available to government when they want them, and they need to know which key to use).
Also note that if governments get their way, you will not be able to have private electronic communication with you doctor, lawyer, minister, priest or analyst. Also you will not be able to have private online discussion about politics, or the means or desirability of protesting governments actions.
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Reminds me of
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Arthur C. Clarke:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
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Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
It isn't safer than one. It's not significantly less safe though either.
As I understand it, the actual message is typically encrypted with a symmetric cypher. The symmetric key is (asymmetrically) encrypted with the public key for each recipient. So if you are doing a group chat with four people, the symmetric key is encrypted with each person's public key.
When you receive the message, use your private key to get the symmetric key and use that to decrypt the message.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Factronising.....
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Yes! YES you need to understand the freaking core of the subject when doing something as potentially destructive as legislation. If you don't understand the subject - and I know that no politician can be experts on every subject themselves - then listen to the army of people that does have the knowledge. The patronizing one here is Amber Rudd who is trying to tell us that we don't know our jobs well enough to protest against a very uninformed and dangerous path. She balks at imagined slights while basically calling us lazy and supporters of terrorists and killers, which is a terrible accusation.
The politicians get an idea in their head and then just tell us to make it happen, but they forgot the most important skill they should need in politics: To listen.
Here is something that I would listen to: If she shows us several respected and knowledgeable people in the field that can present a safe and sustainable proposition to a solution then we could start to talk and hammer it out to something useful. Of course most of us know that is impossible and I suspect very much that Amber Rudd has had many of their own experts tasked with this subject without luck.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
If we aren't willing to give up anything, we are going to lose everything. With no input from tech companies, the government will pass some overreaching legislation like log-everything-for-seven-years. Arguing that some scheme isn't perfect isn't helpful either. Wiretapping voice lines isn't perfect (voice scramblers exist) but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.
So we have to think about what can be done to serve legitimate law enforcement needs and how does that impact users? Everybody agrees that users not being investigated shouldn't be impacted at all. Blanket *gather-everything* orders shouldn't be possible.
What should be possible is highly targeted surveillance against a legitimate court order. By highly targeted I mean it should apply to an individual account beginning on some date and ending on some small number of days in the future. Basically the same as wiretap orders.
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Pre_Internet, law enforcement and security services carried out their function without access to the Information that they are now demanding. Indeed much of the Information they now want to collect was not available because much of it was carried out by face to face, or via phone conversation which were not available because it was recorded at the time.
Now Government are demanding not only that they are party to all electronic conversation, but they are also risking everybody security and privacy, which includes conversations with your bank, doctor lawyer etc. Because they will overuse the ability that they demand to be made available, critical keys will leak to the bad guys, and they will no do anything to help you repair things like a trashed credit rating.
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arrogant, assuming, big-headed, bossy, cocky, conceited, domineering, egotistic, haughty, hubristic, imperious, know-it-all, overbearing, pompous, presumptuous, pretentious, smug, vain.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
You are still arguing that someone—whether it be the tech companies or the government—should have an open backdoor to read encrypted communications. Having two doors is more dangerous than having just one; keeping open at least one of those two doors all but invites hackers in.
Asking for what you want is like keeping your backdoor open all day: It stands a huge chance of letting in people and things you wanted to keep out. Encryption with a backdoor—no matter how temporary or limited as you think it could or should be—is encryption that, sooner or later, the “bad guys” will crack. If you have a way of resolving that issue without a focus on fantastical thinking (e.g., “The nerds can totally make a backdoor that only the good guys can get through!”), you have not yet shared it.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
This was already tried. Look up the history of the Clipper chip. It used your proposed mechanism: encrypting the message with an additional key that was escrowed with the government. The entire mechanism was so vulnerable that the Clipper chip was abandoned only 3 years after it was introduced.
You can find one of the papers analyzing the architectural (not implementation-dependent) vulnerabilities here: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A127127
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Flawed encryption by any other name would still be... flawed encryption
She insisted she does not want "back doors" installed in encryption codes, something the industry has warned will weaken security for all users, nor did she want to ban encryption, just to allow easier access by police and the security services.
Taken into the physical realm, this would be like claiming that the government/police don't want to make it illegal to have blinds in your house, or hold private conversations, as that would be a huge violation of privacy and allow anyone to peek in, something they are totally against.
No, all they want is devices installed that would allow 'the proper authorities' to retract those blinds when they want/'need' to look in, and mics installed which of course would only ever be turned on by 'the proper authorities' acting in 'legal' fashion.
Calling a demand for crippled encryption something else does not make it not a demand for crippled encryption.
She told the meeting Silicon Valley had a "moral" obligation to do more to help the fight against crime and terrorism.
I find this line of 'reasoning' particularly entertaining because it's not hard to turn it around on her and make the case that they are upholding that 'moral obligation' by refusing to cripple security. Making everyone less secure, which is what her demand would do, would be a massive boon to criminals and terrorists, who would be able to access and exploit vast amounts of sensitive and private data for their own ends, and at the cost of the public.
By refusing to bow to her insane and idiotic demands they are doing more to combat crime and terrorism than she could ever do.
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Well that's easy enough, just need to fiddle with a few laws and definitions such that anyone shot by one of those guns operated by an authorized user is, by definition and by the law, a 'bad guy'.
Like magic you've got a gun that can only be used by 'Good Guys', and that only shoots 'Bad Guys'.
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Perhaps women politicians were a bad idea, after all
"I will engage with Albert Einstein and Thomas Crapper to find the best way to combat that."
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'The encryption that criminals and terrorists can use to hide their activity is the very encryption that protects the personal and private data of members of the public from criminals and terrorists, similar to how the ability to hold a private conversation can be used to plan a crime or hold a personal conversation that you don't want people to listen in to for reasons that have nothing to do with the legality of the topic.
Undermining encryption use by terrorists is undermining encryption used by the public, and with vastly more people in the latter category than the former, the public will suffer far more than any terrorist by such a drastic attack on safety and security.'
Or the tl;dr version:
'Politicians who are calling for 'back-doors' in encryption, or anything along those lines, are politicians calling for the undermining of public privacy and security, and claiming that they are doing so in order to protect privacy and security. They are either lying and/or willfully ignorant in their attempts to do so and should be soundly mocked for putting forth such dangerous ideas and their demands refused.'
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'Stupid' isn't gender specific
Copy-pasting from another comment:
'Was it also mansplaining when Techdirt was condescending of Max Hill, Christopher Wray and James Comey, George Brandis and Malcolm Turnbull, and many others (mostly men) for not listening to tech experts about this exact same issue?'
She's being an idiot and/or grossly dishonest, but that has nothing to do with her gender, making it irrelevant at best to the discussion. There have been and continue to be plenty of idiotic/dishonest men 'asking' for dangerously stupid concession regarding encryption, that she happens to be a woman doesn't suddenly make her demand for dangerously stupid concessions any better or worse, or her gender relevant to the discussion.
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Re: Almost agree with you, Tim
Tim, with all due respect, I submit to you that Ms. Rudd is a moron (note: I said that, not Rex Tillerson).
Were this early on in the Crypto Wars 2.0 I might agree that she's simply being an idiot, however at this point there really is no valid excuse for a major politician not to have done enough research on the subject to understand that what they are asking for is simply not possible, and that the experts in the field are telling the truth when they attempt to explain this.
As such I'd disagree with you that those that are still making the demands are idiots. They may or may not be idiots in general, but on this topic they are much more likely to be extremely dishonest, or at the very least willfully ignorant(which I suppose would fall under the category of 'dishonest').
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Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
"Holy crow, do you even understand what you are suggesting?"*
Clearly not. This is yet another person suffering from exactly the ignorance as Amber Rudd. If you don't trally understand the problem you're talking about, the solutions seem numerous and easy.
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Please Don’t Try Conflating Encryption With Guns
Those folks in the US, please do not try to bring up gun analogies to try to justify your opinions on encryption, because that’s the last thing we need.
For those having trouble understanding the difference, encryption is a constructive tool with many important uses, while a gun is just a destructive weapon.
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The UK Has GCHQ, Like The US Has The NSA
But she won’t do that, can she? Or she has, and they’ve already made it clear it can’t be done.
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Incurability
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Re: Please Don’t Try Conflating Encryption With Guns
A gun is also a very, very constructive tool when the use of threats, injury or death are required to compel or force a range of various outcomes. That's why police, thugs, armies and tyrants use them. Defense, in almost any form, is a constructive principle of security.
And try not to tell other people what to do in a condescending and patronizing manner when clearly you have not considered the total shape of the thing.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Re: The UK Has GCHQ, Like The US Has The NSA
They know that this is easy popularity points for them and they know that it is going to require many episodes of hacking and many years to prove that this vulnerability were responsible. Then they are going to shift the blame, deny involvement, and finally just say "that no one could have known". In the end the politicians responsible will feel no actual punishment for not listening because they will be retired or dead of old age. If all this does somehow happen in their lifetime, they will still feel no actual punishment. How often do we see that they just quit their job and then they are seemingly immune to any of the supposed consequences because "The horror of loosing their position must be punishment enough" - even as they get a lucrative job in the private sector or live the rest of their lives on big pensions paid by the people they screwed over.
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Re: Defense, in almost any form, is a constructive principle of security.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Scientist: That's impossible!
Politician: But you have a moral obligation to turn off gravity. Moral obligation makes everything possible!
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Re: Re: Almost agree with you, Tim
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Re: Call Harry Potter
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
You are literally asking everyone to be insecure in order to catch a few bad guys that you possibly can't actually identify before they do something anyway.
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Are you proposing that, upon getting a court order, Apple would push out a special key to a particular phone, and after a certain amount of time had passed the regular key would be put back in?
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Re: Call Harry Potter
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Re: Re: Re:
The only thing left is MAGIC
She should call Penn Jillette. Not because he has a solution to her problems - but because he is so brilliant at being sarcastically patronising - just what she needs!
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Re: Re: Re: Almost agree with you, Tim
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Re:
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Re:
women just can't understand this because its hard.
No - the evidence is that Amber Rudd doesn't understand this because of the things she says.
Trying to play the "sexist" card in this case is simply an Ad-hominem attack!
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Re: The UK Has GCHQ, Like The US Has The NSA
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Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
you are trusting Apple to add only keys for the parties in the conversation. It would be easy for them to insert an additional key.
No -it is not easy it is impossible. There are only two keys in play here. You can't change that without changing the algorithm completely.
As things stand at present the key that is used to decrypt the data never leaves the device belonging to the recipient.
The key used to encrypt the data cannot be used to decrypt the data.
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Re: Only *millions*
After all Alpha Centauri is only inches away:
1,627,657,838,760,000,000 inches to be precise!
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Re:
who will automatically be sneered at and laughed at for not getting it right
Interesting that she admits that she is not going to get it right...
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Re: Re: Please Don’t Try Conflating Encryption With Guns
Encryption is both defensive and offensive, as are guns.
Guns are only defensive on the principle of attack being the best form of defence.
Bullet proof vests are a better analogy for encryption.
So what Amber Rudd is saying is that all bullet proof vests should be compromised in such a way that a certain type of gun is required to shoot you - and of course ONLY the police will have these guns.....
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Nobody should be above being 'splained or indeed derided for being proud of being ignorant.
Let me tell you, I know sod all about encryption except for what I pick up here on TD and Ars Technica so if someone kindly takes the time to explain it to me I am grateful that they made the effort. Amber Rudd would be wise to do the same.
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Almost agree with you, Tim
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Re: Re: Re: Please Don’t Try Conflating Encryption With Guns
http://www.cracked.com/article_18576_5-ridiculous-gun-myths-everyone-believes-thanks-to- movies.html
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
This is precisely backwards. Each concession simply becomes the starting point for the next series of demands. A hard "no" is the only "Dane repellent" that works.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
How is this any different than with phone calls? The government can wiretap voice calls and so there's no such thing as a private phone call, right?
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Re: Re: Only *millions*
The odds of that happening are, well, 10,000,000:1.
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Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
It's right there in the comment you replied to.
If wiretapping of phone calls wasn't already a thing and the governments of the world started to demand the ability to record calls, we would be making the same arguments. But somehow wiretaps exist and hackers don't have access to every single voice call made.
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Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
That's not true. The message itself is encrypted with a symmetric cipher and the key to the symmetric cipher is encrypted with each participants public key. The weakness in Apple's Messages app is that you have to trust Apple to manage all the public keys.
If there were only two keys, you could never do secure group chats.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
That's a pretty fatalist viewpoint. If you are going to subscribe to it, then we have already lost because we (in the general sense) are trusting Google, Apple, and other messaging operators to keep our secrets. Since they control the hardware, software, and firmware on our phones and computers, eventually the bad guys will penetrate their defenses making all of the efforts to protect our communications useless. So none of this discussion matters, right?
I'm a lot more optimistic than that. I think Apple, Google, and others are deserving of our trust. I also think there are legitimate reasons for law enforcement to want to gain access to the communications that pass through these company's servers. It's often possible for these companies to "tap" that data stream in the same way phone and VOIP companies do.
If we ask the same from these messaging companies that we do from telecom companies, then I think that's reasonable. That means they can be ordered to provide access in the future to the data, not the past (ie no dragnet orders). Phone wiretap orders apply to specific numbers over a specific period and so should messaging interception orders.
You can buy an encrypting telephone and that would make wiretaps useless. The equivalent for messaging would be encrypting your messages before handing them off to the messaging company to deliver. That's okay that these workarounds exist. Any solution only has to be good, not perfect.
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Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
I'm proposing that, for the case of Apple Messages, if given a court order to collect messages from a user for the next 90 days (for example), they would generate a new key and add that to the list of keys that are encrypting messages to or from that user. Apple does key management for their users so this is possible. The additional key would be unique and not reused. If the corresponding private key were leaked, only that set of messages would be compromised.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
There is a difference from targeted recording of selected peoples phone calls and requiring that all electronic communications are kept just so the government can look at them should they take an interest in you or anybody you have ever communicated with.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Re: Re: Defense, in almost any form, is a constructive principle of security.
To your .. point - bad people do bad things. No amount of law or state privilege will ever put a cork in that bottle, ever.
I believe that we have a natural and inherent right to self-preservation to include life, liberty, property and privacy. These are things we, as individuals, must do for ourselves as only we can truly do. I am fully aware of the myriad things that can kill me tomorrow or today. This, necessarily, includes a mad shooter, a fucker with a loaded backpack or an idiot behind the wheel. I, for one, am loath to be ruled or led around by the leash of other peoples fears and false promises.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Replace “everyone” with “everything” and you can accurately sum up my viewpoint.
Everyone wants to claim that they have unhackable, unbreakable, undefeatable encryption. And right now, maybe they do. But on a long enough timeline, anything can be hacked, any system broken, any enemy defeated. Just ask Denuvo about how long it took their system to be hacked—then ask about how quick the hacking happens nowadays. All it took was one crack and the walls came tumbling down.
You could craft a form of encryption that takes years—decades!—to break. It would be an amazing accomplishment, to be sure. And as soon as one person cracks it, that accomplishment becomes meaningless. Giving that person more chances to crack it via backdoors will only hasten the process.
This line of thinking assumes that telephone communications work the exact same way as encrypted VOIP calls or encrypted text messages. It also assumes that tech companies could break end-to-end encryption and place a “wiretap” on encrypted communications without also compromising the safety and effectiveness of the entire encryption system. As much as you might wish these things were true, they are not. You may want to re-examine these assumptions of yours; they are flawed at best and a sign of magical “nerd harder” thinking at worst.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
In bulk or in particular, the collection of encrypted information would still require tech companies to compromise end-to-end encryption in some way. If they create that compromise themselves, they help open the door to a far more public compromise of encryption. Why this idea does not frighten you is beyond my understanding.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
If that key leaks and eventually leads to a much larger cracking of that encryption, what then will you say to the people whose devices come under attack, whose personal and private communications are leaked, whose lives may be upended by what is on a device they thought was secure until Apple made it insecure?
Encryption should not have backdoors. No one can guarantee that only “the right people” can and will ever use them; you are no exception.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
The problem is that the government are asking for much more, like requiring companies keep years worth of data, and make it available to the government on demand. That is they have switched from asking that selected people are brought under surveillance, to wanting a full history of anybodies activities being kept, just in case they come to the attention of the authorities in the future. They also classify those who organize protests against any action that they propose as low level terrorists, which give the security services an excuse to examine the activists life in great detail, in the hope that they can find something to attack them with.
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Reality Bytes
UK Home Secretary Calls Tech Leaders 'Patronizing' For Refusing To Believe Her 'Safe Backdoors' Spiels
How dare you not believe in unicorns that poop golden eggs.
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Re: I have equal rights to gun ownership
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Re: Turn off gravity
It only needs to happen long enough for the complaining to stop.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
Governments will never accept that the can get historic messages and not be able to read them, indeed almost all the evidence that they offer about encryption hindering investigations are that they have these messages, or have these devices, and cannot read the contents.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto fans are being disingenuous
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Disingenuous comparisons
Non of your arguments are persuasive; you may as well make your comparison against using steam to open paper envelopes.
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Heh, heh! Turns out are ALREADY backdoors!
From the Daily Mail: "Secret backdoor in Uber's app granted by Apple lets the firm record your iPhone's screen without you knowing"
Headline is enough.
Here's the obvious implication: all you smarty-pants who believe this can't be done are considering only mathematics but doesn't matter if you're right on that, because API can send the message in parallel, or use a known key, or by any number of tricks give both application and key used.
An operating system provides no security from those who wrote it.
Apple / Google / Microsoft nor any corporation are your friend, they're man-in-the-middle agencies of the surveillance state. This PR is just announcing current capability.
Intentionally late to have the last laugh.
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Re: Heh, heh! Turns out are ALREADY backdoors!
Making the case for FOSS with Linux, nice.
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Re: Heh, heh! Turns out are ALREADY backdoors!
Last laugh, my ass. Nice try.
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Protecting us from kid sisters
Bruce Schneier said in his Applied Cryptography textbook:
What she wants to do is to put all of our crypto into the "kid sister" category.
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