The Clipper Chip
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The only thing of substance to this discussion that has changed since then is we have multiple robust open source cryptography implementations, which ensures that if the DOJ can lobby congress to make some laws requiring back doors or key escrow, that only criminals will have access to robust cryptography. And it will likely kick off a cryptography arms race, which will only make their job more difficult than they are saying it is already.
I doubt however the Legislative Branch will give them the laws they want. The last thing our legislators want is to make it easier for the FBI to spy on them.
We had some decent OSS crypto in the Clipper time frame.
What's changed is that strong crypto is now much more wide-spread in NON open-source consumer products.
Crypto is not just for governments plus a handful of geeks any more. That's the big change.
That substantially changes the key escrow argument.
What the NSA et al want is not the ability to decrypt communications, but the ability to search all communications to generate intelligence. Naturally, this only works if the stored take is searchable, which encrypted content is not. (For practical and flexible purposes)
So the very existence of key escrow coupled with the desires of the NSA would almost mandate that any escrow keys available to the government be used continuously and automatically to decrypt content into a searchable data warehouse. Which is why if we allow this then in 5 years or less we're going to be having the Person of Interest "It's not a violation of your privacy if only an algorithm is looking at your data" discussion.
Or to quote Strangelove, "Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know."
There are signs in the Snowden documents that this view is already pervasive in the government.
LIZ FIGUEROA, (D) State Senator, CA, 1998-06: We walk into this room, and it’s myself
and two of my staff— my chief of staff and one of my attorneys. And across from us
was Larry, Sergey, and their attorney.
All of a sudden, Sergey started talking to me. He said, “Senator, how would you feel
if a robot went into your home and read your diary and read your financial records,
read your love letters, read everything, but before leaving the house, it imploded?”
And he said, “That’s not violating privacy.”
I immediately said, “Of course it is. Yes, it is.” And he said, “No, it isn’t.
Nothing’s kept. Nobody knows about it.” I said, “That robot has read everything.
Does that robot know if I’m sad or if I’m feeling fear, or what’s happening?”
And he looked at me and he said, “Oh, no. That robot knows a lot more than that.”
Very cool: create a crypto volume anywhere in your filesystem, and mount it plaintext via the cfsd NFS service.
The NFS protocol served as a "poor man's portable FUSE".
I hope you are right, the thing that concerns me is how brainwashed people are in the post-911 era.
We need to educate people about the technology in their pockets. As discussed in another thread [1], I'm forming a grassroots campaign to do that with a few other developers. If you're interested in being involved, send me an email at stillastudent on google's email service. You don't need to be a developer to contribute.
There are some existing groups working on this, such as Fight for the Future's Save Security campaign [2] and of course the EFF [3]. I support those efforts and have reached out to see how we can work together, though we still plan to make our own website and campaign name for this cause.
My hope is Obama changes his mind on this issue and stops pursuing anti-encryption legislation. Then the campaign would be over. But unless the President strongly endorses encryption, there will be public discussion. We technologists should be a part of that debate.
The agency is really worried about its screens going blank" due to unbreakable encryption, says Lance J. Hoffman, a professor of computer science at George Washington University. "When that happens, the N.S.A. -- said to be the largest employer in Maryland -- goes belly-up. A way to prevent this is to expand its mission and to become, effectively, the one-stop shop for encryption for Government and those that do business with the Government."
The article is from 1994 and I believe my reaction is as true then as now.
Why can't NSA just switch to doing 90% information-assurance and work to secure US infrastructure?
Certainly there is more than enough work to go around, if they are looking for something to do I have some suggestions. The US military isn't really known for having secure communications or storage systems, maybe NSA should try to solve that problem (as a plus it is already part of their mission).
Is the claim here that NSA's budget would shrink if all they were doing was securing US systems and communications against foreign intelligence agencies? Does Congress consider that task unimportant?
Note that the NSA is not asking for Apple to give them a special key to the iPhone. The FBI is asking for it.
Note that a former NSA director (Hayden) and CIA director (Woolsey) have said they both support Apple in this case.
>I'm pretty sure they're focused on stopping terrorist attacks like 9/11 from happening.
That was not NSA's original mission and if congressional testimony is to be believed, not one NSA is particularly well suited to do. SIGINT/COMINT targeting the organs of the Soviet Union is a very different game than interrupting a terrorist plot by a small number of unknown actors.
>Note that a former NSA director (Hayden) and CIA director (Woolsey) have said they both support Apple in this case.
The FBI's position is so unreasonable that it appears nearly everyone that is well informed about the issue and isn't currently employed by the US government supports Apple, but we are talking about the Clipper Chip which was an NSA program.
I know you're quoting the 1994 situation but I just want to clarify for other readers here.
Until the position of the side of the FBI moves off this mark there is not much to discuss.
We need to be active in the conversation about this. As technologists, we are the ones who understand the tech side of this issue best, and we should be reaching out to our representatives and talking to friends and family about this issue.
There are anti-encryption bills looming, and sitting around waiting for them to be proposed in Congress after some future terrorist attack is not going to do us any good.
They do understand.
They have different axioms & goals, so their conclusion is different from yours.
There's a video of former NSA/CIA director Michael Hayden talking about the clipper chip, and how everyone was saying "we're going dark" around that time. They found other ways to get what they wanted, and that's why both he and former CIA director James Woolsey do not support the DOJ's position in the ongoing case against Apple. I can't find the video where he talks about the clipper chip right now.
None of the non-US targets they're pursuing would or could be mandated to use it. And all illegal domestic surveillance aside, foreign intelligence is still their primary mandate and target.
So in return for no benefit they get a lot of headache. (As you know its use would find its way into the US government, and suddenly the NSA has to support it via its defensive mandate)
just a guess, but in the iPhone case, they probably have connections with the employees of the chip foundry where the security chips are made. they probably know the passwords to those things ( the iphone 6 security chips ) before the're even produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_%28cipher%29#Cryptana...
APPROACH 1:
Suppose we have a state issued crypto-system F0(Tc) -> Tp. Alice decides to place another crypto-system F1 on top of that which the state doesn't know about.
Alice unlocks her phone which runs the state's system F0(Tp) -> T1. However, T1 is still encrypted by the unauthorized second-tier crypto-system, F1. This middleware piece of software then runs F1(T1) -> Tp and we have our plaintext. The state, of course, doesn't have the backdoor keys to F1.
The question is how can one prevent this secondary crypto-system from existing? And if one can't, doesn't it make F0 merely a useless ornament that unwraps one cyphertext matryoshka only to reveal another?
APPROACH 2:
idea: any system with a built in guarantee of access by a delegated third party is in contradiction with some theoretical constraints of a generalized security system and puts the whole construction in a lowered security 'level' which had a smaller set of assurances.
Given a user generated token Ku, ciphered text Tc, and plaintext Tp, you have decryption as a function:
F0(Tc, Kc) -> Tp
This requirement is for another key to exist for the State, Ka such that a decryption function F1 (which may or may not be the same as F0) yields:
F1(Tc, Ka) -> Tp
Ka is allowed to be a "salted" key on a per device basis so it can vary across devices as an input to F1.
It does this through another secret function, F2 whose input will be the per-device salt Ds, and a super-global law enforcement key Kl - our secretly held master key.
Law enforcement applies the secret key Kl on the Device and generates the device's master key, Ka by using the Device's Salt:
F2(Ds, Kl) -> Ka
This means that for the law enforcement it's
F1(Tc, F2(Ds, Kl)) -> Tp
Where F1, F2, and Kl are secrets. Tp, Tc, and Ds is known by us and we are free to change.
Here's the issues:
Kl is global across all devices.
F1() must always work regardless of user generated Ku although Ds is allowed to change as a function of Ku.
If I can generate as many Tc and Ds as I can, can we show that given a known F0, F1 and F2 can only be constructed from a exhaustibly reasonable finite set.
How about the idea that the cost of brute-forcing Kl, the master law enforcement key, continually decreases as the number of devices that Kl can open, thus the value of Kl, continually increases? What do the range of those slopes look like?
Each time these silly systems like DVD-CSS broke down and became worthless or like DIVX, were widely panned and rejected by the consumer.*
Showing how this will always and forever be the case at a more fundamental level to stop trying this deadbeat idea with different gift-wrapping would be great.
* Even in MP3, you have bits 29 and 30 which are for copyright. What were they thinking? people would re-implement /bin/cp to look for that and fail if the bit is set? Really? AAC has something similar. silly.
Ex: SCMS copy bit
There was even a movie about coercion called Firewall with Harrison Ford - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/.
Processes which become routine are prone to being subverted, as Mrs. Landau stated in her recent congressional testimony that I linked to in yesterday's article on the FBI and key escrow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1GgnbN9oNw&t=3h35m50s.
Back in 1994 when David Letterman's top-ten lists were still a thing and funny, before instant make a t-shirt websites, I tried to bring attention and defeat the Clipper Chip by printing, selling and eventually giving away "Top 10 reasons to Say No to Clipper" shirts. My 15min of Internet fame (back when that was a saying).
excerpt from usenet post http://archives.scovetta.com/pub/textfiles/digest/cpd/v5_045...
The front has a "Big Brother Inside" Logo, and a chip with the word "clipper".
The back has the following top-ten list (possibly with changed order or slight wording/spelling/grammer corrections);
"Top 10 reasons to Say No to Clipper"
#1 "Can't trust Clinton not to read McDonalds recipes for Big Mac secret sauce."
#2 "We all know its just so the FBI can get free phone sex."
#3 "The spies at NSA will get eyestrain reading all of Santa's mail."
#4 "Because a policeman's job is only easy in a Police State."
#5 "The Clipper chip will cause it to be slightly less convenient to plan protests, revolutions, conspiraces, and bake sales."
#6 "The 4th Amendment was a pretty good idea. Read it."
#7 "If the Feds listened to my conversations they would be too bored and sleepy to defend our country."
#8 "Responsibility and Government don't mix. See #10"
#9 "It will get the stupid crooks out of the way for the government sponsored ones."
#10 "If they learn how unhappy we are with the government they might start shutting down BBS's, killing off divergent religious groups, illegalizing art, conducting radioactive tests with us, censoring books, and keeping files on us.