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Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

Modern encryption is really just math. Cryptography in consumer and off-the-shelf products (which Barr is targeting with his discussion) theoretically _could_ be modified in such a way that the government could decrypt it. The two ways of which I can think are (1) Encryption "backdoors" -- fancy math known only to the government; this would require new encryption ciphers or (b) key escrow. Both approaches have their shortcomings and I'm against both, but it's plausible that the government might try it anyway. All that said, because encryption is just math, any individual or group could employ their own encryption by implementing one of any known existing ciphers -- one without a known "fancy math back door" and refuse to follow the "key escrow" guidelines. In these discussions about the government being able to decrypt stuff, are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal? If that's really what's being proposed, I'd urge people to consider "Illegal Numbers" and how effective that's been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

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Breaking encryption for the government is so furiously stupid it blows my mind every time it is suggested. Especially here, where people actually give the idea merit. It makes me miss oldschool /. where 100% of everyone was on the same page. Your point illustrates a huge reason as to why.

Backdooring stupid.crypt and forcing law abiding people to use it just insures that big badguys will use any other kind of encryption. All you've really accomplished is adding an extra charge of illegal encryption use at the expense of security for every human.

This potentially creates all sorts of pathologies. Is it illegal now for me not to update an old computer? If your backdoors are implemented in hardware, is it illegal to use old computers?

When people are against gun control, a common thread is "make guns illegal and only criminals will have guns." This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Not so with encryption. Other, more free countries will constantly be developing better security methodologies, and reproducing those methods is effectively free. "Fuck up encryption, then only bad guys will have encryption" is a much stronger argument, because it's emphatically true.

The ignorant hubris of this is massively disheartening.

> Breaking encryption for the government is so furiously stupid it blows my mind every time it is suggested.

Yeah. There's no distinction whatsoever between encryption with backdoors and no encryption at all. Imagine our current web with no encryption. Your logins are all effectively plaintext; your online shopping is effectively plaintext; your emails are all effectively plaintext. "Furiously stupid" is a good way to describe this whole proposition.

> This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Hmm, then wouldn't some people just make their own firearms, just as you are describing with encryption, right?

Some people would, yes. Especially rudimentary single shot weapons. However, its much harder to make a reliable gun than it is to make reliable tough encryption. There are designs available for both and there always will be, illegal or not. But making a gun is manufacturing whereas using encryption would just require installing some software. Trivial.

I want to point out, that manufacturing a gun is not "non-trivial".

Given blueprints, (publicly available) or a template and accurate enough measures, a lathe, and a mill, anyone can make a firearm or parts for one in their garage.

Is there reading involved? Yes. But any argument you make w.r.t. The futility of illegalizing encryption is immediately portable to firearms manufacture.

I mean... manufacturing a working modern firearm in their garage is probably much more achievable to the general population than rolling out any kind of encryption software. Anyone with some basic hands-on competency can make a gun.

All you really need is a drill press and some basic tools. People made Sten guns in WWII and that's still a perfectly valid firearm design (fully automatic even) that requires almost no work to make.

Given that I have many, many crypto libraries in many many devices, some of which are heavily modified, chances of me even being able to replace those with broken crypto libraries is like... 0. Many people are in a similar situation, so I don't understand how we could even comply with a law like that if we wanted to (which we don't). So yeah, not only trivial to retain unbroken crypto, but nearly impossible to get rid of it.

Sure, and you'd be hard pressed to get a lot of people to give up firearms they already own. If you sent agents door to door, statistically some result in conflicts to the death with people that weeks earlier were considered law abiding.

Can you imagine asking every gun owner/computer owner to go to their local police station to surrender their guns/functional encryption?

That would be pretty spooky to me.

Not trying to make this a gun control debate, but for the longest time encryption was considered a munition, so it's not THAT non sequitur.

Being physical objects, gun distribution is much much more difficult than encryption distribution.

Ok, I believe we are in the middle of arguing OP's point about how the pro-gun people are wrong when using the argument "only the criminals will own them", and how the pro-encryption people are right when using the same argument about encryption.

And, I think what you're adding here is that I've got an error in my statement that both parties will happily build their own firearms/encryption because the physical gun is harder to distribute than a copy of software.

And I agree in principle with this, until I realize that broad distribution of an encryption mechanism is exactly what a bad-acting government would want... crack once and everyone is compromised.

So, no, I think I would argue that its easier to distribute weapons than good, bespoke encryption.

And further, I would argue that if it is true for encryption, it is also true for firearms... that if they are outlawed, the power shifts to criminals as they will still use them.

My point wasn't that "pro-gun people" are wrong.

The argument is a tautology, it can't be wrong! If guns ownership is a crime, then owning a gun makes you a criminal.

The tautology is compatible with the hypothesis that if guns were confiscated and illegal, eventually there would be a decrease in the amount of people getting shot. Probably an increase for a while as confiscation attempts resulted in agents getting in gun battles with people who don't want to surrender their property.

Whether the loss in life and liberty is worth the outcome is a matter of personal taste.

Sure, the saying has broad appeal because the tautology of it is interesting. The actual debate, however, centers on whether laying down your weapons makes you vulnerable to those that hold onto theirs.. and that was the lens I was looking through.

Many people do that already, perfectly legally. Certainly some percentage would choose not to follow laws banning them.

> When people are against gun control, a common thread is "make guns illegal and only criminals will have guns." This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Even if that is true, "decrease" is not remotely equivalent to "eliminate".

The problem is that as law-abiding citizens, and those who have their weapons forcibly taken by law enforcement are left completely unable to defend themselves; while criminals are not completely unable to acquire firearms.

>are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal? If that's really what's being proposed, I'd urge people to consider "Illegal Numbers" and how effective that's been.

I keep seeing this "implausibility" of enforcing illegal encryption brought up, and I really think it's wishful thinking. If such encryption algorithms ever are made illegal in some manner, it will be trivial for the government to get the result they want.

It won't be about completely stopping people from using AES, nor will it be about imprisoning every person who continues to use it. What it will be about is turning "this target of our investigation is using illegal encryption" into an immediate cause for search/arrest warrant. And that will be more than enough for 95%+ of the purposes they're looking for.

True, and this should frighten everyone. You'd be a suspected terrorist or criminal for using a VPN or tor or any foreign service that doesnt use the gov approved crypt. As long as you stayed out of the limelight and kept your head down you'd be fine. But if anyone looked into your activity, it would be easy to determine that you weren't using gov-crypt. This is inheritely authoritarian.

I can think of a few ways to make this a real pain for law enforcement. Sure I use my crypto to encrypt a tunnel then you use yours to encrypt a tunnel etc.... Make an onion out of the cryptosystem and law enforcement has got to get piles of warrants to cut through the various layers.

It's stupid, sort of like a fourth ammensment onion router

Key escrow has a number of problems, not the least enforcement that keys are valid and validated. (something that there's not a good history of, and international issues come up)

Back doors are worse though - build a back door and it will be used, just not necessarily by the agency it was built for. There are a lot of groups with a lot of resources oriented around taking advantage of this, and few are legitimate. (and some are enemy nations).

There's a third problem - doing it in such a way that it can't be blocked from monitoring. (see "clipper chip" for more on that).

False.

Also "technical solutions" makes it sound like the issue is in inventing the correct encryption scheme. Whereas in reality the issue exists because we have discovered (currently) unbreakable codes, and the invention of broken (backdoored) schemes does little to change that.

If we break all known forms of encryption, and find a reasonable proof that they are no longer possible, then I'll be more interested in this line of reasoning. And that's a pretty big if.

I totally get what you are saying, but it is quite the rabbit hole if we determine that 'we can't have any illegal number... everyone should be able to share any number with anyone else'

That basically means we have to entirely get rid of copyright, since all data (books, movies, software, corporate secrets, state secrets, etc) are just very large numbers.

Do we believe that there should be no restriction on the sharing of any data? I can see the appeal, but there are far reaching consequences if we say that.

Care to run down that rabbit hole? I happen to think copyright is a concept which is intrinsically broken with the advent of modern computing power and connectivity.

While I happen to agree with you, I think it's important to distinguish the two:

What A.G. Barr is insinuating is to regulate algorithms.

For example, GPG is a software implementation of encryption algorithms. It has a copyright (used as the basis for its copyleft license). RSA, however, is an algorithm: a mathematical reality that can be described by copyrighted works, but never itself copyrighted.

A.G. Barr has expressed a desire to compel every American who implements that algorithm to do so incorrectly.

We don’t need to use copyright as an example.

Words are just data. Are there illegal combinations of words to exchange? The law says, YES. Some speech is absolutely illegal, including making credible death threats, conspiring to break other laws, or disclosing certain state secrets to foreign powers.

Very few people argue that since words are easily available to everyone, that it is futile to make some combinations of words illegal.

Words are not illegal per se.

Words uttered in a situational context that renders them of immediate harm are illegal. I can say "Fire!" in a theater while giving a lecture or putting on a show. I cannot knowingly claim the theatre is on fire when it isn't to cause a panic.

Point is, it is not the Word or content that is illegal. It is the union of word and context that is illegal.

Subtle difference, but it's the only thing that keeps that type of law from getting absurd and out of hand very quickly.

I agree with you, and make the same point about numbers.

The number is not illegal, it’s the number in conjunction with a situational context that is illegal.

We may disagree with the intent of the law, but the argument that we are making numbers illegal, or math illegal, is parallel to the argument that other laws make words illegal.

Ha but when a number is uniformly "random", and the context is lost, as in it's just a bunch of bits floating around in storage, what argument is there?

Ok maybe you could catch me attempting to decrypt it, and be like "gotcha, that was in fact a secret!" But I'd reckon it would be more effective to simply wait until you finish decrypting the data, and simply take it from you.

If there are going to be laws around this, it's sure to be very pathological, and scary.

If I have a random number without context, how is it illegal by itself? It isn’t.

If the context around the number is that it is stored in a .mkv file with a name that looks like a Disney property, or a .key file attached to a program that uses such things for some kind of encryption the government unwisely bans, well, the number suddenly has context around it that makes an argument about the number and the context.

Same for words, really. Words about a threat to a government leader are probably fine in a text file that looks like a short story. Those same words in combination with a history of advocating violent revolution, &c. might make for a different argument.

We are talking about functions, not data.

In that sense, copyright = data, and encryption = functions.

A function can be described with data.

>In these discussions about the government being able to decrypt stuff, are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal?

All images are binary. All binary is just a number. We have made many such numbers illegal and even have software that will detect them and report you when you share the number with such number sharing services (dropbox, facebook, etc).

So making math illegal sounds entirely possible.

You are talking about data, so following that logic, what would be made illegal would be implementations not algorithms.

Math can be represented in a variety of ways, but the pattern being described is immutable.

What A.G. Barr is insinuating is not that we make implementations illegal, but that we make the use of algorithms categorically illegal.

While I don't know of any, had someone made an algorithm that could generate such illegal numbers I suspect it would be considered illegal from the first day of its existence.

This is all true, but I think encryption backdoors are more possible than people think.

The target here is not nerds able to pull code from GitHub or run open source or enterprise software. The target here is consumer stuff by companies like Apple and Google. The government doesn't want it to be easy to do end-to-end encryption.

For the average user, easy equals possible. The average user has neither the time nor the expertise to roll their own solution or run nerd tools. Look at how PGP/GPG's complexity and absolutely horrible UX (even for technical users!) has prevented e-mail encryption from ever taking off.

This reminds me of what a government guy told me about crypto export controls. Yes, they know that crypto export controls won't stop nerds using GitHub. What they want to do is to stop IBM, Google, Apple, Cisco, Juniper, etc. from selling ready-made polished crypto products to blacklisted countries.

In both cases I think the target is large corporations not individuals and the goal is to make crypto hard and keep it out of the hands of the average user or less-technical foreign organization.

That being said I still don't think it'll work. Just pointing out the thinking that's going on here.

> That being said I still don't think it'll work. Just pointing out the thinking that's going on here.

The problem is that this either shows a stunning amount of ignorance or deliberate malice.

Let's just go back and consider that the government does not want the average user to have strong encryption. What is the play here? The average user is almost by definition not the bad guy, unless we consider the population at large to be criminals by default. Is the government trying to dragnet the entire population and keep everyone under the thumb for minor infractions? Because that's the only feasible target here. Barr can froth at the mouth, mad as the dickens, it won't prevent Bad Guys from using strong encryption. So his only feasible target is the (mostly) law abiding population.

The other point, preventing the likes of Google, IBM, Apple, et. al. of selling devices with strong encryption to blacklisted countries again shows either ignorance or malice. As parent wrote, encryption is just math. Are the government agencies so shockingly uninformerd that they think that in absence of secure IDevices, north korea will be forced to use backdoored technology?

The spread of physical goods can be controlled (to some degree), but the spread of information can at best be slowed down, but not stopped. Doubly so if there are already existing methods of secure communications that the government cannot efficiently crack.

The only conclusion I can come to is that they are well aware that they cannot catch any serious Bad Guy using mandated backdoors. Serious Bad Guys will use strong encryption anyway, they will cover their tracks and won't care what is legal or illegal (in the US). Furthermore, against targets like these, there are already time proven methods of infiltration, social engineering and good old fashioned bribery.

This only leaves the option of taking secure communications away from the population at large, perhaps because the government feels threatened from too many people being able to share ideas? I was never one for tinfoil hattery, so my hope is that I'm wrong.

This idea represents the best possible compromise to the situation outlined here. I think we should all be crypto hardliners in the sense that we refuse to allow laws against certain kinds of math, but at the same time, we may have to compromise on government access to keys once they have been handed over to a third party.

If you have not handed your private keys over to anyone, they should be yours alone, but once you have uploaded your private keys to a coroprate cloud server, you may have to accept that law enforcement will be able to get warrant access.

This won't solve the problem for law enforcement, but it will make it easier to catch lazy people while preserving the option for full security for those who want to control their own data.

The scenario you described accomplishes both goals.

By banning 'the masses' from using encrypted communications, it'll sort the haystack and everyone who continues to do so can be profiled, plus they're already involved in illegal behavior.

You better believe I would start streaming random data all over the internet just to be an asshole

Then, in the US, you have obstruction of justice and/or interference with police/peace/public officer.

I think it's more of a protest, or am I not allowed to email myself numbers?

You are, up until the point where it's cost a law enforcement officer time to determine that either the numbers are intended to waste their time or that the numbers are a hidden/unbackdoored encryption. Then you're GG SOL

You literally cannot prove it either way, you can't prove it's not enciphered data, you can't prove it's not random garbage, that's the point. You can say that 'we could develop a safe backdoored system that will allow only lawful decryption in the event of emergency' in the same way you can say 'we can launch probes made of candy to distant planets that will build cities and plant potatoes for us'. It's a fantasy. The keys will leak, criminals etc will still blend into the crowd.

How so? Couldn't we come up with a way of disguising encrpyted message streams so that they did not stand out? It would be more expensive, and given enough analysis they could probably detect them anyway, but it strikes me as an arms race.

For centuries, the law has recognized information as property. Encryption is just a transform of information. The government can argue that they're simply banning certain types of property - something they've done for at least 100 years, maybe longer.

Can you explain how this actually solves the main problems? I can see this form of encryption catching unsophisticated "bad hombres". Unsophisticated here meaning, either ignorant of weaknesses in the technology they use, or aware, but unable to improve upon it. The most motivated adversaries will make use of other schemes.

Worse, for secrets we actually care about (nuclear codes?) we must still research proper encryption schemes since backdoors are admissions of weakness in a security protocol fundamentally as far as I've come to understand.

> We are confident that there are technical solutions that will allow lawful access to encrypted data and communications by law enforcement without materially weakening the security provided by encryption. Such encryption regimes already exist. For example, providers design their products to allow access for software updates using centrally managed security keys. We know of no instance where encryption has been defeated by compromise of those provider-maintained keys. Providers have been able to protect them.

This quote from the article seems to contradict itself. First it claims "... without materially weakening the security provided by encryption" then goes on to state "We know of no instance where encryption has been defeated by compromise of those provider-maintained keys" implying that there is a possibility of this kind of breach.

This whole thing seems like an oligarch's attempt to spy on it's people pretty plainly to me. Where is the liberty and freedom in this?

> Can you explain how this actually solves the main problems?

a lot of weight rests on those two words: "main problems". The main problems for the government are that criminal investigations are being impeded. By banning certain forms of encryption, they can criminally charge a suspect for merely refusing to decrypt data. And you can bet that the penalties will be stackable, allowing the government to use its discretion and perhaps charging someone with separate counts for each file he refuses (or is unable ...) to decrypt. I'm NAL, but I've also heard of the "forgone conclusion" doctrine, which somehow allows the constitution to fly out the window and allows the gov to imprison someone indefinitely until they decrypt the files. So, sadly, this ban does solve the main problems at considerable expense to citizens' liberties.

Conjecturing further:

- citizens would be allowed to encrypt, but they'd be required to keep a set of the keys used or else they could risk prosecution.

- There could be a government cloud server where you "securely" upload whatever keys you use (or, realistically, probably outsourced to companies like equifax which would then charge you a fee to do so),

- existing cloud providers would be required to detect when clients were using encryption-looking libraries/subroutines and store a copy of the keys into some registry.

- this could ultimately lead to "whitelist-only" software libraries, so that you cannot run anything on the cloud without building it with their dev environment so they can be sure you're not secretly encrypting things.

- going even further, this could lead to deep packet inspection that simply detects encrypted transactions and queries them against the gov key registry to "make sure" they are properly decryptable. Any failures to decrypt could trigger an investigation.

Ah yes, but then doesn't the problem boil down to proving that a random value is in fact an encrypted secret?

You arrest me, scan my file system and find something named "plan.txt" which is just a bunch of gibberish... what do you do?

EDIT: I'll argue that the "main problem" is that as long as real encryption schemes exist, this is impractical to enforce.

In theory, yes that's a big part of the problem. In practice, however, once the gov charges you, you're effectively guilty-until-proven-innocent because your court-appointed public defender is likely not going to be trained or equipped to provide a logical defense, much less hire an expert witness in computer forensics. Plus the gov will approach you with a plea "deal" : you can plead guilty to one charge of illegal encrypted data, pay $20k and 2 years' probation, or else risk going to the slammer for decades on the stacked charges with a maximum sentence of 3 years per file, times the 10 files they were "unable to decrypt" on your system.

> arrest me, scan my file system and find something named "plan.txt" which is just a bunch of gibberish... what do you do?

well, start by scanning every executable binary on your system. If they find a custom-rolled program that doesn't impregnate the encrypted files with known headers (for contrast, openssl ads the prefix "Salted_" to any file it encrypts) they can allege that you're using a clandestine encryption scheme and that "plan.txt" is one of the files. So again, the burden of proof would be on you to explain what that file was for, which can come at tremendous legal cost.

Exactly, thanks for spelling it all out. Back to your original point then. Banning specific types of property is one thing, but this isn't that. It's banning all forms of property, and as you say, whitelisting acceptable ones. This seems extremely dubious, and unconstitutional (just guessing).

As someone who likes to be free to use the computers I own, this scares the shit out of me.

There is an important distinction here:

Encrypted data is information.

Encryption algorithms are math. Math can be expressed with data, but the immutable intangible reality that is being expressed is not information, nor property.

By your logic, the government can argue banning encrypted data, and encryption algorithm implementations.

The latter hits close to the mark of what A.G. Barr is insinuating. It would still be a significant for a government, especially the U.S. government, to ban the implementation of specific algorithms. That would equate to banning the writing of specific mathematical formulae, which is equivalent to censoring speech.

I agree, and I could have been more precise. I highly doubt we'll live in a world where the AES algorithm or source code or even binaries is illegal. The crime will simply be if the gov can show you were using information-hiding practices illegally, such as without an adequate key escrow system (for a large-scale deployments) or refusing to decrypt communications when asked to by LE.

I guess that's one way to take over the tech industry.

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