So you support China being able to hack any phone globally with a warrant in a Chinese court? Isn't that literally what Huawei are accused of facilitating?
The combination of requiring physical possession and appreciable hashing time per crack is a two-layered response to mass-surveillance. That’s the whole basis of the compromise I’m proposing: calling their bluff, and enabling warrant cracks as political cover to shut down mass surveillance and cracking as unnecessary.
The "appreciable time" is going to be subject to constant downward pressure, both politically and technologically.
> political cover to shut down mass surveillance and compromise as unnecessary
Mass surveillance is not going to go away without huge cultural reform of the security services. They don't take concessions.
FakeComments was mostly talking about targeted surveillance, but I agree with him/her in spirit, since I believe that mass surveillance is not going to go away. Ever. So you can either yell futilely into the wind as it happens over your objections, up to, including, and perhaps going beyond a swarm of camera-bearing networked nanodrones coating the planet, or you can try to nudge it towards happening on slightly preferable terms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philpot_Curran#Quotations
>"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." - George Orwell: 1984, 1949.
Welp, guess that's it for freedom. A person from the past wrote something. No more for us to do here.
However, I do not believe they can effectively enforce any encryption bans. Thus, people who need encryption will still have access to it. And as far as I am concerned, my duty (as a software engineer) is to ensure that it remains the case, even if using it becomes illegal.
Say that in the year 2160 you have perfect, unbreakable encryption on your pocket computer. How will you use it? With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it. Of course, the master key is most important but all of these concerns apply to the data being protected as well.
The real thing that can never be effectively enforced is privacy. People who need encryption can have access to it or not. It matters not one whit. Our duty (as people) is to push society in a direction where this change feels less catastrophic, not to fight a Caligulan war against the sea.
You're basically describing a totalitarian Panopticon. A society like that should be fought by all means available, including physical force, so the question of legality of encryption is somewhat moot at that point.
More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19040252
I agree that it would be a consistent political battle — but it’s already that, and it’s clear people with power are getting fed up with technologists attempting to impose their ideology without compromising with other social needs.
That’s what prompts laws about wiretapping or mandated backdoors.
I haven’t heard the same arguments about safes I do about encryption — and the reason is because there’s an understood bypass, if they gain access, have time and money.
By compromising and allowing targeted cracking, we split the faction pushing for backdoored phones, solve most of the issues, and give ourselves a viable path to accomplish something rather than being forced into backing down or completely compromising systems. Further, by being willing to compromise, we gain a voice on shaping how that discussion looks — rather than largely being excluded.
This is not at all how encryption or security works
You create a hash chain, then use the final result as an encryption key of your secret (in this case, the key for the data), then store only the start of the chain and encrypted secret.
The only way to retrieve the secret is to recompute all the hashes, from the start, to recreate the key and decrypt the data.
So it’s secure unless you believe there’s a weakness in the underlying encryption or hash function.
Further, you can parallelize this via encrypting the start of chains with other chains — giving a significant advantage to the chain creator: they can do 1000 chains in parallel, but unlocking requires decrypting them sequentially. At that ratio, if you want decryption to take a month of steady hashing, you need only do a little under 1 hour of hashing yourself. 1 hour of 1 GPU is about a dollar of expense, and has more than 1000 parallel tracks.
My suggestion would be that Apple create a chain for each phone and then load it with that phone specific wrapping key — which it uses to return the actual encryption key wrapped in. The only way to decrypt that key is get the necessary information from Apple and a signed request so the SE will emit the encrypted key at all.
I appreciate you trying to correct me, but I never was saying that this was an instance of “public key encryption”, whichever version you mean.
This is a scheme by which you can intentionally create a key that can be re-generated in a fixed amount of time, and use it as part of normal symmetric encryption to protect a secret. One usage of that is creating intentionally crackable schemes, such as protecting other signing keys in a way you can later crack if you need to. This allows a device, such as a phone, to emit a masked secret that we have cryptographic guarantees it still takes time to recover.
Hashchains for time locking is a studied mechanism, and though it predates crypto currencies, it’s deployed as a mechanism in several kinds of applications there. A second usage is in storing paper copies of master signing keys in a safe, since the key cannot be exposed in the event of a robbery before a certain period of time — giving you time to rekey your system. (Generally, people use multipart keys instead, because they’re less cumbersome to recover; however, if you only have one secure location — multipart keys don’t help. Hash chains still do.)
So it’s literally how (part of) modern cryptography works.