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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I think politicians must win prizes or something for showing who is the stupidest:

> The bill also allows the attorney general to create a competition with a prize for anyone who can come up with a way to access encrypted data while protecting privacy and security. Security experts have long noted that this is an impossible request.

Why they're at in, why don't they push a bill for permanent rainbows.

Also, the article states "The proposed legislation stops short of requiring tech companies to create a backdoor", so if end-to-end encryption is still available, this legislation does nothing. And if lawmakers try to ban end-to-end encryption, well then "banning math" should be the name of this legislation (yes, I realize politicians have tried to do that before). Sure, large companies may comply and average joes may get less E2E encryption, but anyone who knows anything about tech will be able to get access to E2E encrypted messengers.

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On “banning math” and that “politicians have tried to do that before”: I suspect you are referring at least in part to what the Australian Prime Minister said in 2017:

> The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.

This particular statement was widely lampooned in tech circles at the time as obvious nonsense. Yet it’s actually perfectly sound: legislation is all about restricting you from doing things that are possible. (Now some of the other stuff Mr. Turnbull said at that time was drivel; he seemed to be under the impression that it was possible to allow law enforcement to access end-to-end encrypted content without it comprising a backdoor, which the industry as a whole considers axiomatically false.)

It’s the government’s prerogative to ban mathematics. And indeed they already have in various areas due to copyright and possibly patent laws (c.f. illegal numbers). Now I personally think they would be unwise to ban any form of encryption, but realise that they’re quite at liberty to not just try to ban it.

The only laws that can't be broken are the laws of physics.

But can punish a person for doing an act that is perfectly legit under the laws of physics

Of course. If you drop a large weight on someone from a great height, that's generally seen as a problem. ;)

It’s a stupid statement because he’s using imprecision of the English language to try to make some sly commentary on his institutions relative power while also exposing the _exact_ point tech/science makes. While he has the power to make the _practice_ of mathematics law illegal, the law of mathematics that defines encryption will still exist, in the same places his man-made law touches.

Indiana also tried legislating 3 as the value for Pi. The bill giving various values for Pi from 3 to 3.2 to 4 made it to the senate for ratification before it was quashed.

So I propose a trade: any time Australians want to mock politicians we’ll refer to the Indiana Pi bill, any time North Americans want to mock politicians they can refer to “the laws of this country not the laws of mathematics”.

Noting that this was not about banning the possible but making the impossible mandatory.

Exactly, it's not like the police isn't abusing physical access to goods, or "lawful" access to phone conversations or citizens databases.

How else will police fund their new cars [1] or arrest the new boyfriend of their ex [2] ?

My point is that the government sees no problem at all with the potential for large scale abuse of government access, just like they don't have any serious safeguards against abuse of existing ones, for example, holding physical keys (for example, would you consider using emergency keys for entering a girls' dormitory and forcing everyone in the hallway to "check for lockdown laws being upheld" a perfectly legal precaution. And if they do it for such absurdly juvenile things, what hope is there for them to do better under pressure ?)

[1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po... [2] https://psmag.com/news/stalker-cop-police-protection-danger-...

> This particular statement was widely lampooned in tech circles at the time as obvious nonsense. Yet it’s actually perfectly sound: legislation is all about restricting you from doing things that are possible.

Quite. I guess it also makes perfect sense to ban water from flowing down hills. It's possible, after all ...

The reality is some of their laws have already been torn apart. Australia used to have one of the strongest censorship regimes of any democracy. They gave only up after passing the silly things when then banned computer violent games, in an age where everybody bought them from an overseas online store. I think the kids must have blinked in disbelief at the stupidity of their elders, then returned to their game pads.

Then there are laws I really would like to work - like the anti spam laws. I'll lay odds the head of the Federal Police gets spam addressed to him every day. I hope for his sake it's blocked by technology, because it sure as hell isn't stopped by any of the laws they passed or his police force.

People aren't lampooning the idea the government can't ban whatever they want. They are laughing that in an age when encryption algorithms are form the core of ecommerce, are published on Wikipedia, thousands of web sites and government standards, the government is claiming banning them will have any more effect than passing a law saying π is 3.

It was an absurd statement. Moreover, Turnbull knew that, and didn't appear care. Which means it was pure bullshit. I'm guessing it was dog whistle to the crazy right that had sway in the party at time.

>"a prize for anyone who can come up with a way to access encrypted data while protecting privacy and security."

A prize for a cake that can be eaten but will never be consumed.

I think nanobots could accomplish this. The end result might be unexpected though...

It should be a square pie.

Each time you want an encrypted session you need to make a request to the government third party key signing service that, with your public key, the public counterparty's key and a government generated key for your session, a new key for the session is produced.

It's possible but potentially expensive and has issues with who gets keys on international communication. And it's also dumb.

Don't attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by malice. It's only stupid if you accept their ostensible rationale, but it makes perfect sense if they're trying to pry open the data of the average citizen, not some mythical terrorist.

> Security experts have long noted that this is an impossible request.

You know, this could be a total political cover move. Pass some bill that makes it seem like tech companies will open comms to law enforcement, but make sure it doesn't actually work. Then, you can campaign on being tough on crime in November, and if somebody ever brings up the topic later, you can blame the biased big-tech firms for not wanting to work with Republicans.

So encryption tech can't deliver permanent rainbows, but the politicians get them anyway.

Throw lots of dirt at a wall and see what sticks.

Legislators don't have to show up to court to defend their dumb laws, so there's no requirement that their statute have any semblance of coherence.

Government attorneys show up to court after some poor citizen spends a ton of money on legal fees to challenge a bad faith law. Worse yet, some bad faith laws are crafted in such a way that no (living) person has standing to bring it to court to challenge the statute.

"Sure, large companies may comply and average joes may get less E2E encryption, but anyone who knows anything about tech will be able to get access to E2E encrypted messengers."

We are all lazy. I can use gpg, but how often am I going to do that? The NSA won't have access to the recipes that my brother sends to me, but aside from that, they'll get everything.

To bad for them, though. They'd be better off with the recipes than the rest of it.

Anyone committing a serious enough crime to "justify" breaking encryption would be very motivated to not get caught.

Yes, though the intelligence of criminals varies wildly. One person might organize drug deals over speakerphone in a Starbucks while another might torrent movies only over a clean laptop connected to a public access point with a long-range wifi antenna.

If a criminal is that unsophisticated, there should be other ways to catch them? Mind you, there are better ways to tackle drugs than a Law & Order approach.

How many of these sophisticated and non-lazy criminals are there?

If you have a lot of sophisticated and non-lazy criminals, my guess is that there is something very wrong. I'd like to know more about these characters and what kinds of crimes they are committing.

Serious question (about practicality, not ethics): people always say that it's impossible to provide government access to encrypted data without opening a huge security hole for hackers to exploit. Why couldn't an encryption scheme be used that, for decryption, requires either a) the user's private key (a usual), or b) some sort of combination of private keys of all the relevant government entities required to authorize accessing the user's data? So that something like the combination of a judicial private key and an fbi private key were required to access the data?

Of course the data would still be hackable if a bad actor were to get their hands on both of those keys, but security could be increased by, for example, increasing the number of parties needed to authorize the access.

(Please don't critique the ethical premise here - I make no claim that this is the "right" thing to do, just that it could be plausible)

That's exactly it, it's very possible, but all the eggs would be in one basket.

Scheme: multiple copies of symmetric key followed by symmetrically encrypted body (pgp-style). One copy of the symmetric key is secured by user's private key, another is wrapped in an onion of all required "side" keys.

The issue is that the government-held keys only need to be exposed once, and then someone has a key to all of everything, everywhere.

They mentioned having multiple keys with different government organizations. What if there are 12 keys and you need 6 keys to decrypt the data. The user has 6 keys. The company that created the device or service has 2 keys, the judicial branch has 2 keys, and the executive branch has 2 keys. All of the non-user keys are required to be in different systems. The compromise of any one system still requires cooperation from the non-user groups to decrypt. You couple that with some system that allows the data to be decrypted and reencrypted with new keys in the case of a breech of keys. You can add as many keys to this scenario as you want until you feel like a breech of the necessary number of keys is not going to happen. Are we sure a system along these lines is impossible?

Unfortunately, each key will be poorly protected, because each group will rationalize that "it would be impossible for someone to get all those keys" while someone gets all the keys.

The US government couldn't even keep the most sensitive information about its personnel secret, see the OPM breach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... The Inspector General had warned Congress of "persistent deficiencies in OPM's information system security program" and nothing was done. This resulted in some really sensitive data being exfiltrated, probably some good blackmail info. The US government has not done a great job even protecting its own employees.

The biggest problem here, though, is incentives. A government cannot be sued, or suffer any other negative impact, if it accidentally loses keys that lead to others' death, blackmail, or job loss. Too bad, so sad. If tomorrow it becomes illegal or unacceptable to do something that today is legal, a government can retroactively punish those who engaged in it. In short, the government has no strong incentive to protect the keys, only you do.

It sounds like we have already moved from this is an impossible request to this is a difficult and impractical request. Setting up a government competition with a prize to solve a hard problem seems reasonable.

> It sounds like we have already moved from this is an impossible request to this is a difficult and impractical request.

I am not sure how you got this from conversation above. Still sounds impossible to me.

Problem as stated is, that if skeleton keys are broken, then everything everywhere gets broken.

The fact that government has bad initiatives to keep keys secret, just means it will be easier for bad actors to steal them. But that is just a side argument.

>I am not sure how you got this from conversation above. Still sounds impossible to me.

When discussing encryption, many people say that this is an impossible problem to solve because of math. This conversation has shifted to being a problem about incentives. Math is impossible to change. Incentives are changeable. If the only problems here are the specifics of the scheme and the incentives of people involved, those are solvable.

>Problem as stated is, that if skeleton keys are broken, then everything everywhere gets broken.

Which is why you build redundancy into the system that would require multiple independent breaches and a system to reencrypt data in the event of a breach.

Attacker can record encrypted data before getting the masterkey.

During usage, all pieces of master key will have to be brought together into one place (phisical or virtual), so eventually still only one breach is needed.

If I encypt data using encryption without backdoor, then to illegitimately get clear text requires effort X, and it gives access to 1 persons data. If whole country encrypts data using backdoored scheme, then effort Y will give access to data of 100 000 000 people. It would seem that security of the backdoor should be 100mil times stronger then that of usual crypto.

> When discussing encryption, many people say that this is an impossible problem to solve because of math. This conversation has shifted to being a problem about incentives. > Math is impossible to change. Incentives are changeable. If the only problems here are the specifics of the scheme and the incentives of people involved, those are solvable.

It's still a math problem in the end.

Today if you want to break into someones encrypted data, you either have to break encryption algorithm (which is hard and by hard I mean even stuff we consider insecure like 3ple DES are still not broken) or you have to break each data individually.

With skeleton keys that changes. Suddenly all the world secrets are one* key away. That is the big difference. Doesn't matter how you do it, it fundamentally changes the equation

And you open up HUGE attack vector, by enabling bad actors to bribe/coerce people with access to skeleton keys.

* Doesn't matter if you split it up, have different org have parts of keys etc.

In the real world, impractical is the same as impossible.

It's easy to enable a third party to read encrypted data, simply give them the key. That is not and never has been the problem.

The problem is ensuring that only authorized uses occur. There is no algorithm that can determine good guys from bad guys. Keys are notoriously hard to keep secret. Any mechanism that tries to transmit them now adds a third party, and we have enough problems trying to keep things secure when they're only two parties. Storing them securely is highly improbable to occur in practice. We cannot even store simple data securely. The OMB breach showed that employees were unwilling to apply basic security practices to protect data about themselves... why would they securely store data when they won't be hurt? Splitting them helps a little, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem.

And this ignores the fundamental problem that groups like terrorists can simply use a different algorithm. When somebody says please think of the terrorist children, they assume that somehow they will use the bad encryption everyone else is stuck with. If someone is willing to violate one law, they will be willing to violate another.

It would be interesting to take something like that to an extreme. Have approximately every adult in the country receive a key share, with 90% of the shares required to reconstruct the key.

Computer viruses.

Modern security involves generating a key for every session and this could be dicey with a master key.

Yeah, that's the symmetric key in this scheme, I should have said session key.

> Of course the data would still be hackable if a bad actor were to get their hands on both of those keys, but security could be increased by, for example, increasing the number of parties needed to authorize the access.

Not "if", "when". It will happen, and as soon as it does, everyone's privacy (for previously encrypted content) is gone forever. It is impossible for me (and I think a lot of other people) to imagine the government can keep those keys secret for a reasonable period of time, nonetheless forever.

> So that something like the combination of a judicial private key and an fbi private key were required to access the data?

Because, eventually, they'll leak. Security and intelligence agencies have lost keys and hacking tools and top security documents.

And when they leak, the surface for what you can exfiltrate before the keys are rolled over will be _everything_. If you can roll over the key.

Microsoft leaked their Secure Boot key once, and it wasn't possible for them to fix that on all of their devices. Whilst that isn't a particularly concerning leak, that changes if what it was protecting becomes someone's personal information.

To protect against a leak that compromises everyone, everywhere, you'd want the government keys to be unique per site and company. Which would also incidentally make securing those keys harder and lead to more leaks.

And that's before you question whether the people with access to the keys are actually trustworthy and won't do what law enforcement have done in the past, like stalk their ex.

It's a no-win situation.

> Because, eventually, they'll leak.

All of them will leak? Seems like if each key is in possession of a different party, and you need all keys to decrypt, and at least a few are air-gapped only available for warrant holders via manual retrieval... the probability would be vanishingly small.

I agree it's impossible in theory, but in reality nobody has put out significant resources and made an honest effort to try, imo.

I bet I could come up with an encryption scheme that allows decryption for warrant holders only, but the scheme to decrypt will be very onerous for the warrant holder and will require manual retrieval of air-gapped asymmetric keys and lengthy background checks to establish trust (i.e. is this person who they say they are and did the judge really grant a warrant, etc.).

And I bet I'd not use it.

You can add whatever extra bureaucratic processes you want, but you're still making my encrypted data less secure.

There was that government OPN hack not so long ago with all that gov PII. And consider the tempting target these keys will make for state actors.

To clarify, it was the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

But I agree, it's a perfect example of why we can't trust even the most security-trusted people in the US government with skeleton keys to all of our data.

Didn't someone walk out of the NSA with a USB stick filled with classified documents and viruses?

> All of them will leak? Seems like if each key is in possession of a different party, and you need all keys to decrypt, and at least a few are air-gapped only available for warrant holders via manual retrieval... the probability would be vanishingly small.

There are always tons of assumptions we make when we say these things.

We assume that the computer used to generate the keys was never connected to the internet, has not already been compromised at the time of key (re)generation, there are no backups of the computer, the engineer that performs the key generation is extremely trustworthy, the room this is done in is perfectly isolated from surveillance, etc. If you start calculating these probabilities and multiply them together, you start observing them moving further and further from 100%.

> but in reality nobody has put out significant resources and made an honest effort to try

These just seem like No True Scotsman fallacies. If anyone comes up with evidence of an effort, are you going to move your goalposts?

IMHO, the incentives don't exist. Law enforcement can't even secure their own technology and vendors (eg. BlueLeaks, OPM hack). The tech companies tasked with this project only see it as a cost center and see it as a potential massive risk to their brand if this system is misused. During the Snowden leaks, there were accusations of NSA contractors using the search system to spy on family members, dating partners, etc.

Human behavior is too predictable to naïvely assume that we can increase security while increasing the number of keys/people who have access to a massive tranche of data.

> Seems like if each key is in possession of a different party,

The nature of the federal executive is a problem here: keys spread among federal agencies are functionally in the hands of one party.

> I bet I could come up with an encryption scheme that allows decryption for warrant holders only, but the scheme to decrypt will be very onerous for the warrant holder and will require manual retrieval of air-gapped asymmetric keys and lengthy background checks to establish trust (i.e. is this person who they say they are and did the judge really grant a warrant, etc.).

Whilst in theory ideas like these work, they don't in practice.

When security is tightened, and oversight is made more difficult, we regularly see the players involved skirting the system because they're human and don't think that they're really doing anything wrong.

Stuxnet was a while ago, but pierced an air-gapped network through a means that... Shouldn't have been possible. It was possible because of the failure of the humans involved. A factor that can't be removed.

You would find keys being surreptitiously shared over insecure shares, and getting caught up in other data leaks. Two or more departments sharing keys between employees to save some time and effort. Or forgetting to shred a key securely once it has been accessed. It doesn't take long until everyone in the department ends up with a key - and then each of those is a weak point.

The NSA has had repeated problems with their processes being avoided and ignored by employees skirting oversight to stalk their ex's, by doing things like listening to their phone calls - which supposedly required a warrant. [0]

You can't trust the people involved.

Now, there's a very, very simple way to avoid all of these problems. Secure the data to the fewest number of people required. Placing the responsibility of keeping the keys secure with the direct stakeholders.

An end-to-end encrypted chat still has the possibility of keys being leaked. But only the people who will be directly impacted are involved. You don't need a large and complicated scheme, and it is dead simple to implement, comparatively. You only have to trust the people involved, not swathes of departments.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

> All of them will leak?

You say that like there isn't form. The keys used by every DRM scheme has leaked. Every one. It was not from lack of trying, not because they didn't have access to the best and the brightest. HDMI was actually pretty good.

The problem is not just technology. It's also humans. Create a big enough prize for obtaining a single thing, and it will leak. Every man has his price.

When the prize is the ability to read every communication of every USA citizen, politician and corporation, if you aren't thinking about what sort resources nations like China and Russia can throw it at, you aren't thinking hard enough.

The problem is the only way this is trustworthy is if you require signoff from either 4 or all 5 of the permanent members of the UN Security council. That's the only existing agency I would trust to be sufficiently adversarial to ensure reasonable privacy.

What if each person got to choose 5 trusted friends?

Can i choose /dev/null as my 5 friends?

The 5 friends probably have to be distinct, but you might get away with using symlinks.

Algorithmically speaking, Shamir's Secret Sharing seems of interest to your "combination of private keys" option.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

• https://cs.jhu.edu/~sdoshi/crypto/papers/shamirturing.pdf

I agree with the sibling commentators though that it just isn't strong enough to withstand a threat model of "people motivated to get the master key to vast amounts of encrypted communication". Even if such a scheme couldn't be cracked algorithmically, it wouldn't hold up against the relentless social engineering efforts that would be thrown at it.

> people motivated to get the master key

Or, more likely, people charged with protecting the master key being negligent.

One of potentially many examples: https://www.renderlab.net/advisories/mta-key/

Important to remember the government itself might be the worst actor. Trump busy doing favours for Saudi Arabia who murder & hack up a reporter. Imagine the favours if he had access to those keys via his corrupt DOJ. Terrifying.

Encryption keys do not have to give "all or nothing" access to encrypted material. With homomorphic encryption and related primitives, you can shape things in a much more finer grained manner and only expose carefully crafted partial information. This can accomplish what you are hoping for with your threshold cryptography example without relying on some sort of combined trust built from multiple authorized parties.

For instance, with functional encryption, you are able to distribute or derive keys that have a very specific functional purpose and leaks no other information. Basically it allows you to derive a "function key" that basically computes f(x) for you given an encryption of x. As long as the crypto is strong, no other information about x is exposed (only info about f(x) is revealed).

With the right system architecture, this would allow the government to perform a very specific, pre-defined query to check for illegal content without exposing any additional information about the encrypted data.

Another approach you could use is based on zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computation. Essentially a government could come along and ask you to provide a proof that your encrypted data does not contain malicious content. Given a program that can check for what they are looking for, you can provide them a zero-knowledge proof that convinces them that you correctly ran their provided algorithm on the suspect data and that the algorithm did not identify any malicious content. In this process, no other bits of information are exposed or handed to the government other than the data is not malicious.

All of this presupposes you can create an algorithm that can "check" if something is illegal. That seems impossible if you have to define the algorithm before the crime is comitted, and honestly still pretty difficult even if you know what specificly you are looking for.

It's why the antivirus industry exists despite continuously failing. They're pretty much fighting that impossible battle every day.

Key fragments are managed by which governments? And it would differ from the U.N. Security Council, how? Probably it would be Five Eyes rather than the WWII surviving super powers? But back then they were more on the same page than today, so in 10 years or 50 years, the one key to rule them all countries likely don't still get along either. I think it just devolves into an espionage race to acquire all the fragments. Or breaking the code.

> Why couldn't an encryption scheme be used that, for decryption, requires either a) the user's private key (a usual), or b) some sort of combination of private keys of all the relevant government entities required to authorize accessing the user's data?

It maybe be technically possible to make such a scheme, but due to the unitary executive, keys split among N government agencies have the same essential practical security as 1 key held by one counterparty, and one counterparty that has no particular interest in the security of your data. So this fails the “preserves security” aspect for the same reason that any system that enables government access must.

It's been tried before. It was cracked so badly they never tried it again.

There is an even more advanced solution: homomorphic encryption lets you operate over fully-encrypted, undecryptable data, and compute new derived data from it that -- if decrypted with the same key -- is as if the computation was done over the decrypted version to begin with. This can be used to create 'blind' machine learning computer vision models that can detect objects in encrypted data but still can't actually 'see' what's going on.

I thought that was in the realm of theoretically possible but 1e-10 x as efficient?

Others have correctly pointed out the threat presented by key loss. I would like to add that I don't trust the government to properly follow the law once they have the keys. If law enforcement, the justice department, or intelligence agencies hold the key then the only things stopping abuse are administrative controls. That's not acceptable to me as we have seen repeated bypass of administrative controls from all 3 of these groups. The only acceptable solution would be to have the data holders control the keys and process law enforcement requests for data, and then you still have to worry about key loss or theft of keys by intelligence agencies.

A far simpler solution to this problem would be to change the law to mandate disclosure of encryption keys / passwords if served with a warrant. I don't agree with this either, but at least it's more elegant than what is being proposed.

What if someone throws away the keys or forgets their password?

What if the house with all the evidence burns down and all of it is unusable ashes?

Can you do that at the press of a button ahead of time?

What if the government goes pursuing old crimes (or divine something that points to you) and you don't remember the password?

You could show that they accessed a device or used a service immediately prior to being subject to litigation (through network logs for example). A judge would not believe the person didn't remember the password in this case. If they destroyed the keys after receiving a request for data then that would be destruction of evidence which is already punishable. If the data is held by a third party then the third party could perform a password reset.

How long does it take for cases to be brought to trial?

Could you argue the stress of going through the legal system made you forget your twenty word password?

A lot of attacks on cryptosystems involve things such as being able to encrypt whatever you want with the private key, being able to generate lots of messages encrypted with the private key, or being able to observe the errors that occur when decrypting a slightly wrong encrypted message.

By allowing anyone to encrypt a file to the government's private key, you're vastly increasing the chances that one of these attacks goes from infeasable to easily doable.

Right now, if someone were to find a chosen plaintext attack on AES, they could find someone who will encrypt things with their key, get them to encrypt the chosen plaintext, and then break other things that person had encrypted.

If we used the proposed system, then the chosen plaintext attack would allow me to encrypt the plaintext on my own, and then use it to break everything in the world that was encrypted.

Looking at the current political environment where entities that were supposed to act as independent organizations are now all controlled by people actively doing as the president instructs them, how long before some one from each of those organizations with a key are all sitting in a room decrypting the private communications of political enemies?

Well, with current encryption techniques this is impossible, but depending on what is meant by 'access', there are certainly ways of encrypting data in such a way that it maintains privacy while still being able to question if the data contains knowledge of certain things.

For example, you can have a child pornography machine learning detector that operates over completely encrypted data via homomorphic machine learning. You can also use zero-knowledge proofs to ask a properly stored piece of data whether or not it contains a particular fact, without actually having to read the data. Depending on what is meant by 'access', this is a reasonable request.

Requiring homomorphic encryption of encrypted data channels while government overreach perhaps, seems like something that can satisfy both a desire to have encrypted, unencryptable data, while still being able to examine the data in flight.

Have you been circulating subversive documents which embarrass our wise and honourable government?

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