Action Item: Protecting Ourselves from Encryption Backdoors
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001148.html
Yesterday, in "The Politicians' Encryption Backdoor Fantasies Continue -- and
Legislating Pi" ( http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001147.html ),
I discussed moves in the U.S. Senate to convene a commission to proceed
toward their fantasy goal of finding a way to backdoor strong encryption
algorithms "while still protecting the privacy of honest users."
As I noted then, this is an impossible task, since the very act of
building backdoors into these algorithms (ostensibly for law enforcement
and intelligence needs) would make these encryption systems exceedingly
vulnerable both to "official" abuse and vast third-party black-hat
hacking attacks -- including by terrorist groups and other criminals --
who of course for themselves will continue using easily available strong
crypto systems without backdoors.
I viewed the call for an encryption commission to be essentially a
smokescreen for moving toward the government's ultimate goal -- being
able to read all encrypted communications upon demand.
Within hours of my posting yesterday came word that there's already a
bipartisan move in the senate to not bother with any commission, to just
move directly to legislation mandating law enforcement access to
encrypted communications. Period.
I rest my case -- smokescreen proven. Q.E.D.
Whether or not such legislation passes immediately is not really the
point, because ultimately the odds are very high that sooner or later
something like it will become law here in the U.S. -- and likely in many
other countries as well. Not just the obvious suspects like Russia and
China, but in the EU also, which constantly speaks out of both sides of
its mouth when it comes to privacy and surveillance issues.
So sometime soon -- be it one year, or two, perhaps a bit more if such
laws become entangled in court cases (as seems likely), we will be
facing the reality of strong, end-to-end encryption essentially being
outlawed, at least in the context of the major Internet services that
most of us depend upon.
These are the firms that government is currently most concerned about --
Google, Apple, Microsoft, and more -- who have been moving rapidly and
correctly to provide their users with strong crypto (e.g. on
smartphones) that even the firms themselves can't crack. Such moves have
been triggered in large part by the continuing parade of government
overreach when it comes to accessing the data in these devices.
Also, these same services have been moving toward providing stronger
crypto for their centralized "cloud" services as well, including "only
the user holds the keys" encrypted file/data storage systems.
All of these services and more will likely be targeted by government
encryption backdoor legislation in coming months and years.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
Or first, a different question.
Do we care?
The pro-backdoor argument runs something like this ...
Bad guys use encryption (to some extent not clearly known, but
expanding). Government can't monitor their communications to prevent or
solve terrorist attacks or other crimes (child pornography is frequently
mentioned in the latter category) without access to that data. The risks
and potential loss of privacy that honest users face from backdoors in
these systems for law enforcement and intelligence use is the price we
have to pay for living in a 21st century society.
If you're in the category just described, you likely need not read any
further in this post.
The counter-argument is that serious bad guys will quickly move (if they
haven't already) to crypto systems that don't have backdoors, leaving
mainly honest users on the compromised systems.
Encryption experts and computer scientists are in virtually unanimous
agreement that any attempts to backdoor these systems weakens them in
fundamental ways, making them massively vulnerable not only to
government abuse and demonstrated ineptitude (such as permitting the
personal info of millions of persons to be obtained by crooks from
government computers), but also hacking attacks of all sorts, including
by criminal gangs and worse. With so much of our financial and personal
information now online -- whether we all like that or not -- purposely
weakening encryption systems for honest users is intolerable.
If you're in this second camp -- as am I -- we're back to the "What do
we do about it?" question.
And actually, the answer is quite clear. Data that is already encrypted
when it is stored or shared, using strong encryption systems that are
validated to not contain backdoors (a much tougher validation task than
laymen might assume) is not subject to the sorts of backdoor snooping or
backdoor hacking exploitations as would be data encrypted on systems
mandated to contain backdoors.
Perhaps even more to the point, government still has ways to target
particular criminals or other evildoers when they really need to -- in
particular through "endpoint" surveillance of various sorts directly on
targeted PCs. But generally speaking, backdoored centralized crypto
systems represent much greater risks related to mass abuse, mass
hacking, and mass surveillance. And this holds true irrespective of how
"clever" proponents try to be about splitting up encryption keys and the
various related key handling processes.
So honest, good users who feel that they deserve at least the same level
of encryption protection as bad, evil users will need to be ramping up
their own use of strong encryption systems locally, so data that doesn't
need to be stored unencrypted in central services for processing is
encrypted in ways that backdoors cannot typically penetrate.
Which data will fall into this category will be largely an individual
choice, of course. Cloud environments provide immense value in a vast
number of ways -- email systems, file searching, document creation and
editing -- on and on. Most of these -- given current tech, anyway --
require that data be unencrypted in the cloud so that it can be
processed for the user. On the other hand, for end-to-end
communications -- say from one phone user to another, or
between users in various other contexts, the need for central
processing of those messages -- other than passing them along encrypted
as they are -- will often be nil. So central systems in these
circumstances become the conduits of data that they do not
need to decrypt nor interpret.
A bitter irony is that while some terrorist groups seem to have all
manner of sophisticated and relatively standardized strong encryption
systems that government backdoors are unlikely to reach, ordinary honest
users are faced with a confusing hodgepodge of crypto systems that are
generally hard to use, often incompatible, and basically just a pain in
the neck that discourage their widespread adoption, especially by
non-techies.
The relatively straightforward bottom line?
Given the quite reasonable assumption that mandated encryption backdoors
legislation targeting large Internet services is very likely coming --
exact timing unclear, but on the way -- efforts need to be expanded
right now toward making personal encryption systems that can run on
users' local computers as simple, reliable, automatic, and ubiquitous as
possible.
Not to shield evil. Not to mask criminals and terrorists.
But simply to protect the good guys. The rest of us. You and me.
And that's a fact.
Be seeing you.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently
doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.
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