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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

That's wrong. Encrypt all necessary data with government-controlled public key. Government can get in, but hackers can't.

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That’s an insecure system. All Eve needs to do is get hold of that third-party key. It’s like requiring all homes to be master keyed with a key held by the police - you need to find an officer willing to take a photo of the key for a few thousand dollars and now you can get in to any house.

Any plan that relies on NOBUS ("NObody But US") information - like a global private key - is a brittle design that will fail catastrophically when the keys become public (either Snowden-style, or accidentally disclosed like the TSA master keys[1]). Why should we ignore prior experience and assume such an important, linchpin secret will somehow stay known to "nobody but us" this time?

[1] https://boingboing.net/2015/08/21/make-your-own-tsa-universa...

Google HTTP security relies on Google TLS private key. Does it make a brittle design? Keys are supposed to be protected. In this case key could be assembled by a few subkeys with different people holding control over it, so they should come to an agreement before deciphering anything.

Yes it relies on Google keeping their key (or keys - there's nothing wrong with having multiple valid certificates for a domain, especially if you're the registrar) private. Google keep their key private, Amazon keep their key, Stripe keep their key. If you want to attack any provider you have to recover that provider's key.

Now if you mandate everyone use a government key or escrow their key with the government there's now a single place to attack. Also this place is affected by government whims, staff pay freezes, cutbacks, layoffs. All you need is one disgruntled employee or contractor with access and you now have access to _everything_.

Even assuming this is possible, which it isn’t, whose government would hold whose keys? It’s not like there’s one government and there isn’t international crime

US for US companies, China for Chinese companies. May be some kind of union.

What about multinationals? What about subsidiaries, like a Brazilian company which is fully owned by a USA company? Who would get the key, Brazil or the USA?

So what happens when a chinese company hack into an american company, steal some industrial secrets and save them on their encrypted servers?

This isn’t some hypothetical scenario either http://time.com/106319/heres-what-chinese-hackers-actually-s...

That's wrong. Insiders can leak the private key, or hackers can take it.

Or the government can leave it behind their remote servers along with their cyber weapons for anyone to wander by.

Or anyone who is willing to spend enough computational power now only needs to crack one key instead of millions of different ones.

If there's anyone who can have enough computation power to break key, then that key is weak and its size should be increased.

One can only make keys so large to be useful—my point is the same, still, that one would only have to break/find/buy/steal a single key instead of millions.

Or a contractor can take it home, against policy of course, and then it gets submitted to an online anti-virus scan.

Or it gets left on a USB key in a taxi

Or it gets left on an un-scrubbed laptop that's put up for government auction.

Or any of the other which-ways that humans get around policy limitations that don't have technical barriers, or socially-engineered to get around the technical barriers.

Everyone can leak the private key. That's not a concern of secure protocol. Of course there should be means to migrate to new key if that happens. Important keys are unlikely to be leaked.

>Important keys are unlikely to be leaked.

The more important the key, the more sought after it will be by hackers, especially one which could theoretically decrypt an entire countries communications. It's only a matter of time.

Decss again

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