Comment by korethr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by korethr | Hacker News Reader

As Schneier says, it's better than the "nerd harder" attitude exhibited previously.

However, I take issue with this part:

> After all, we are not talking about protecting the Nation's nuclear launch codes. Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications.

I think he is intending to argue that the quality of the encryption should be tiered, that "consumer" comm crypto should be weaker than business operations crypto should be weaker than gov't crypto. If so, I think this is a bad policy.

I just got through a security audit by one of our customers at work. One of the points that their security team made was that they want us to do more to protect the mobile devices used at our company. Even though said mobile devices do not, and will never have, access to the customer's sensitive data, the customer argued that a mobile device being breached gives an attacker a foothold, and allows said attacker to move closer to getting access to their data.

I think the same principle applies to this notion of lower-tier crypto for the peasants. Lower-security systems interact with higher security ones, and if those lower security systems are breached because their security was artificially lowered, they become threats to the higher security systems with which they interact.

I don't doubt that if crypto for Not-Government were kept artificially weak, that China or Russia would leverage that to their advantage, moreso than they already are. I think it would also make things easier for not just state actors, but lower-tier criminals, as well. If Barr wants to have an easier time catching bad guys, he should probably not make it easier for bad guys to do bad things.

There are ways to backdoor encryption without weakening encryption. In fact defcon hackers are constantly talking about how vulnerabilities in encrypting can make decrypting easier.

Allow me to openly think about this:

Take an image for example. If I hash it and encrypt it I can still recognize similar pictures. If I use a different set of analysis like color distribution I can also identify the picture with more time. If I release tiny bits of encryption key, I can weaken encryption but still cause a significant time of consumption to break down the code. Meaning it still won't be easy without effort.

I believe NSA tried to weaken encryption in a way that only they could break the code with enough time. They ran some sort of limitation on the kinds of keys that were generated.

This still brings a high cost to decrypting but streamlines it so that only certain people will have the power of doing so.

And then you will have actors who build their own dedicated hardware (like e.g. BitMain did for BitCoin mining) that is on par with state level actors -- many of which are likely now comparable to the NSA.

A little farther, you'll have services where you bring your own message ("really really mine. I just forgot the encryption key!"), pay, and get a decryption.

There is no way to select who the encryption is "weak" for and who it is "strong" for, except with a backdoor (e.g. DUAL_DRBG, or backdooring an RSA private key generation so the public key includes an encrypted version of the seed used for the private key) -- but a backdoor, once open, is open for everyone.

> I think he is intending to argue that the quality of the encryption should be tiered, that "consumer" comm crypto should be weaker than business operations crypto should be weaker than gov't crypto. If so, I think this is a bad policy.

I don't think this is strange, since this is how it works in physical. A home has a simple lock, a business a few better ones and a security system, and a military base has 24/7 armed soldiers on guard.

Impossible to do right now for encryption of course.

> I don't think this is strange, since this is how it works in physical. A home has a simple lock, a business a few better ones and a security system, and a military base has 24/7 armed soldiers on guard.

Yes, but this is not how it works in cryptography and there's no reason it has to. Should we deliberately weaken crypto systems so that they work similarly to some other arbitrary system? The question seems to answer itself.

That does seem to be the policy for copyright..

If you put secret things in a military base. But then move them away and 5 years later the locks are broken there's nothing there anymore.

The physical world can't have all locks past, present and future broken simultaneously across the world, possibly without you knowing.

Knowingly and arbitrarily weakening encryption is risking those stakes for IMO not a good enough reason.

About the only things in common thinking about physical and digital security is the word security.

There are issues of scale that make that a poor analogy. You can't leverage a botnet to automate attempts to pick the locks of every home in the country. Nor can you pick a normal lock from thousands of miles away. Even if you get inside, you can't duplicate the entire contents of a house in a matter of seconds to rifle through later, and it's darn near impossible to break in and rummage around without being detected.

But that's just an artifact of the available resources. There is no law that prevents you from putting a better lock on your home or even hiring armed guards to protect your residence. Are you arguing there ought to be?

Indeed, and I suspect that's part of where the mentality comes from. One could argue that said simple hierarchy is appropriate for the threat model in most cases in the real world.

Where this falls down, is that if my threat model is different, rightly or wrongly, I can still change the locks on my home to something more fitting the threat model. If we were to try to fit the crypto policy that that Barr seems to want to real-world locks, then that could get problematic, quicky. I want to lock my hunting rifle's case with an Abloy, because using the toy locks from Home Depot is fucking irresponsible? Nope, not allowed. That's miltary-grade; civilians don't need military-grade tools. Requiring one be a business before one can get/use moderately-strong encryption could all too easily become a regulatory burden that causes a lot of small and medium businesses to become less secure, and further entrench the largest companies. And as the current top root-level comment points out, it would make getting blackmail on the rich and powerful that much easier.

I think it should remain impossible to do for crypto, because as another reply to you points out, the real world differs from the digital world in important ways. Trying to force the digital world to be more like the real world is likeable to make both suck more, not less.

It’s better for the user to assume they’re totally pwned and should act like they’re in the open, than for them for assume the bad encryption works.

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