Adam Back wrote:
On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 06:23:30PM +0100, Ian G wrote:
I was involved in one case where super-secret stuff was shared
through hushmail, and was also dual encrypted with non-hushmail-PGP
for added security. In the end, the lawyers came in and scarfed up
the lot with subpoenas ... all the secrets were revealed to everyone
they should never have been revealed to. We don't have a crypto
tool for embarrassing secrets to fade away.
What about deleting the private key periodically?
Like issue one pgp sub-key per month, make sure it has expiry date etc
appropriately, and the sending client will be smart enough to not use
expired keys.
Need support for that kind of thing in the PGP clients.
And hope your months key expires before the lawyers get to it.
Companies have document retention policies for stuff like
this... dictating that data with no current use be deleted within some
time-period to avoid subpoenas reaching back too far.
Hi Adam,
many people have suggested that. On paper, it looks like a
solution to the problem, at least to us.
I think however it is going to require quite significant
support from the user tools to do this. That is, the user
application is going to have to manage the sense of lifetime
over the message.
One tool that does approach this issue at least
superficially is Skype. It can be configured to save chat
messages for different periods of time, I have mine set to
around 2 weeks currently.
But, then we run slap-bang into the problem that the *other*
client also keeps messages. How long are they kept for?
I'm not told, and of course even if I was told, we can all
imagine the limitations of that.
I hypothesise that it might be possible to use contracts to
address this issue, at least for a civil-not-criminal scope.
That is, client software could arrange a contractual
exchange between Alice and Bob where they both agree to keep
messages for X weeks, and if not, then commitments and
penalties might apply. Judges will look at contracts like
that and might rule the evidence out of court, in a civil
dispute.
OK, so we need a lawyer to work that out, and I'm definately
whiteboarding here, I'm not sure if the solution is worth
the effort.
Which is why I am skeptical of schemes like "delete the
private key periodically." Unless we solve or address the
counterparty problem, it just isn't worth the effort to be
totally secure on our own node.
We know how to do invisible ink in cryptography. How do we
do its converse, fading ink?
iang
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