I'm not sure why people are assuming they've abandoned the idea. They've simply said it's not technically feasible.
Which implies that later - through the power of delusions of grandeur - that it will become feasible.
Which implies that later - through the power of delusions of grandeur - that it will become feasible.
To revive this, they would have to find an expert to attest that it is technically feasible to have security with a backdoor that government can access, but at the same time is impossible for malicious entities to access.
Ergo, this is technically dead, which is the best form of dead.
> Ergo, this is technically dead, which is the best form of dead.
Except it's not. There exist such cryptographic trapdoor constructions that are perfectly secure, if the government backdoor key is kept safe.
The problem is keeping the government backdoor key safe. But that's not a literal impossible technical problem. It's much more a social problem.
Don't get me wrong, I really, really wish what you said was true and we could kill this garbage forever by nature of technical argument. But it isn't, so we must keep fighting against it for the real reason: we simply don't want this.
Anyway, I am gladly surprised they seem to back off.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/master-key-for-tsa-approved-locks...
More importantly, the thing that's technically impossible is a scheme to detect that the key has become compromised before it is used maliciously.
Microsoft, Google, Apple etc are keeping the keys that allow you to push updates secret, aren't they?
Source: sometimes interact with the UK government
There's a lot of of hopium in this thread for people who I think want it to be more impossible in practice than it really is.
Governments can provide immunity, which companies can't do. Companies try not to do these kinds of stealing, governments don't care.
If the backdoor crypto key is compromised, sure they can revoke it (assuming they manage to design a competent system), but all the sensitive information up that point is now available to whoever possesses the backdoor key. Unlike the software signing case, exploitation of the compromise is likely undetectable unless the attacker reveals their knowledge somehow.
But opponents of the OSB claim it will make communication with your bank less secure - how?
From yesterday:
> the China-Based threat actor, Storm-0558, used an acquired Microsoft account (MSA) consumer key to forge tokens to access OWA and Outlook.com. Upon identifying that the threat actor had acquired the consumer key, Microsoft performed a comprehensive technical investigation into the acquisition of the Microsoft account consumer signing key, including how it was used to access enterprise email.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408776
I think Microsoft’s handling of keys is almost certainly far, far more secure than anything the British government would care to achieve.
Not a problem. Just change the locks every week. [tapping head]
A big problem with this statement is the term “the government”. If you give the private key to the UK - the US, India and China will want a copy as well.
The UK might want to spy on foreign nationals only in the country and only for CSAM, but that doesn’t mean other nations won’t use it for more traditional espionage.
Key escrow for the entire US and world was floated with the Clipper chip (1993-1996). That was strangled in its crib because trusting thousands of people at NSA or GCHQ to just not stalk people is sheer fantasy, just as the Snowden leaks revealed.
iMessage stores the e2ee key in iCloud by default, which effectively makes all of a user's communications decryptable by governments and Apple at any time.
To offer a centralized service with actual privacy without zero knowledge p2p constructions, then it falls victim to the Lavabit problem. If you want security and plausible anonymity across your own devices, not metadata, then use a fork of Signal such as Session. (Signal is irreparably broken by being tied to phone number, which is a universal tracking device. The only people who use Signal are drug dealers and software engineers who don't know any better.)
I'm a software engineer who does know; I'm aware that Signal is currently tied to phone numbers, and I'd love for it not to be, but I still use it, because it's E2EE and easy for non-technical people to use.
When there's something that's easy to use like Signal that uses decentralized cryptographic identifiers and onion routes all traffic, I'll start trying to get people to use that. I'd be happy to hear any recommendations.
Session (Signal fork) doesn't use phone numbers. It's pretty well-designed overall and uses an onion routing approach. It's already a superset of Signal except it doesn't use phone numbers. https://getsession.org
Also look interesting:
* (unproven) https://www.olvid.io/technology
* (unproven) https://simplex.chat
PS: Using regular TOR on home broadband or cloud servers is relatively risky and inefficient. Sybil attacks on it are common. And to network operators and security agencies it gives an easy "flow tag" of your uplink and exit node data traffic as automatically suspicious.
It's an older reference, sir, but it checks out.
Very roughly, I assume every Whatsapp message follows something along the lines of:
1. Unencrypted input
2. Encryption
3. Encrypted transmission
4. Decryption
5. Unencrypted stream to display handler
Technically - what's to stop them from compelling Apple and Google into putting a software keyboard logger inbetween 1 & 2 and another output logger between 4 & 5?
Edit: I'm not saying this backdoor would be secure btw. Of course it wouldn't. But that seems to me a separate issue than "breaking encryption"