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Comment by adgjlsfhk1 | Hacker News Reader

the problem with backdoored encryption isn't making a cypher with multiple decryption keys. It's keeping secret that's worth billions of dollars and shared among 10s of thousands of people. The difference between backdoored encryption and no encryption is whether the backdoor is known to the public.

There is a coherent set of values that lead to saying "no encryption", but not one for "only backdoored encryption".

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Could it be possible to make a cryptosystem where messages can be decrypted either with the recipient key, or by sequentially applying say, 100 different backdoor keys, such that the different backdoor keys could be stored on different machines without ever being present on the same machine?

If you increase the number of backdoor keys needed to decrypt by enough, and have these keys be stored only on hardware that is meant to make it infeasible to extract the key from it, and if these machines are distributed among a sufficiently large and varied group, maybe that could work as reasonable oversight to prevent the backdoor from being used outside of select cases?

Edit: to be clear, I don’t want this. Just trying to map out what positions could reasonably be held / what options there are.

> There is a coherent set of values that lead to saying "no encryption", but not one for "only backdoored encryption".

While I oppose building backdoors, I don't really agree with this claim. There's nothing incoherent about developing a threat model.

I think some threat models, like one that doesn't include hackers, are not coherent relative to reality.

A threat model can include hackers while not taking every action that could prevent every conceivable attack from a hacker.

Your government isn't the only one out there. If your government can have a backdoor, so can every other government. If the US, EU, Russia, and China all have backdoors to everything, who are you keeping it secret from?

The powers that can't pay? If the US, EU, Russia, China all have nukes to everything...

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