4 ms·

How would they realistically prevent people from using encryption?

by dharma1 11y ago

cbpy 11y ago
They could make it illegal and require a backdoor on all electronics?
- dharma1 11y ago
  good luck requiring a backdoor on chinese made chips, or trying to ban their import
nota_bene 11y ago
Mandatory hardware based backdoors, unlimited funding for CPU power to accelerate decryption of intercepted data, etc.
richmarr 11y ago
Ban encryption without back doors. Some companies would withraw products, others would comply, maybe some others would protest for a while. After a while the only option left would be steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography At which point it seems unlikely they'd be able to do anything other than work on techniques to detect steganography (which they no doubt already do)... which leaves us with a steganographic arms race (which has probably already been the case for some time behind the scenes).
- rvnt 11y ago
  What are some valid alternatives/compromises we could work towards in order to prevent such drastic ideas from being incorporated into law?
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  I love the idea of using Facebook, Email, Youtube, Instagram etc. to tunnel Tor. Wonder how difficult it would be? It's probably already happening just look for slightly different duplicates of the same videos.
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    The problem here is that tor is largely focused on realtime communications, and stuffing packets through e.g. facebook chat would probably be too slow. It would work great for another anonymity network that was more message-focused with no realtime needs. That said, you might be interested in tor's meek pluggable transport: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek Essentially, the idea is that someone buys a VPS hosted on a cloud service with common ingress IPs (such as Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, etc). Tor clients then connect to it, sending an innocent-looking domain (gmail.com or something) in the TLS SNI header, and then only in the datastream protected by TLS do they expose the tor protocol. This is of course useless against NSA and GCHQ, which have access to all these cloud providers, but it's very useful for example for people behind restrictive country-level firewalls as the authorities are reluctant to block such large services and it's hard for them to distinguish this from normal traffic.
gtf21 11y ago
They couldn't, as this video explains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G8dPAdmyss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G8dPAdmyss If two people really wanted to communicate, they could still do the encryption on paper, and transmit the garbled messages.
- Joeboy 11y ago
  Spoiler: The video shows two people using a one time pad to communicate. It doesn't show any reason the government can't ban people from doing that, or stop WhatsApp using good encryption in the UK, or throw people in prison for using PGP. Admittedly that's not going to happen in the UK in the near future, but contrary to popular belief there's no reason you can't make maths illegal.
  - gtf21 11y ago
    But it's really quite hard to make using a one-time pad illegal, and even harder to make maths illegal, so practically, while they could install all the backdoors in the world, they would struggle, practically, to prevent people ever encrypting anything.
    - Joeboy 11y ago
      I doubt they're that bothered about people using one-time pads on paper. I think they're bothered about encryption becoming sufficiently normal that the stuff they want to see is indistinguishable from cat photos. There are measures they can take (legislative and otherwise) to prevent that scenario happening.
- dharma1 11y ago
  Paper aside, I don't see how it would be viable for UK to try to enforce back doors all electronics, ban the import of non-back doored electronics, or enforce a ban on encryption software. You can make it illegal but it won't stop people from using it
  - Joeboy 11y ago

How would they realistically prevent people from using encryption?

by dharma1 11y ago

How would they realistically prevent people from using encryption?

cbpy 11y ago

They could make it illegal and require a backdoor on all electronics?

dharma1 11y ago
good luck requiring a backdoor on chinese made chips, or trying to ban their import

nota_bene 11y ago

Mandatory hardware based backdoors, unlimited funding for CPU power to accelerate decryption of intercepted data, etc.

richmarr 11y ago

Ban encryption without back doors. Some companies would withraw products, others would comply, maybe some others would protest for a while. After a while the only option left would be steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography At which point it seems unlikely they'd be able to do anything other than work on techniques to detect steganography (which they no doubt already do)... which leaves us with a steganographic arms race (which has probably already been the case for some time behind the scenes).

rvnt 11y ago
What are some valid alternatives/compromises we could work towards in order to prevent such drastic ideas from being incorporated into law?
andy_ppp 11y ago
I love the idea of using Facebook, Email, Youtube, Instagram etc. to tunnel Tor. Wonder how difficult it would be? It's probably already happening just look for slightly different duplicates of the same videos.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  The problem here is that tor is largely focused on realtime communications, and stuffing packets through e.g. facebook chat would probably be too slow. It would work great for another anonymity network that was more message-focused with no realtime needs. That said, you might be interested in tor's meek pluggable transport: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek Essentially, the idea is that someone buys a VPS hosted on a cloud service with common ingress IPs (such as Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, etc). Tor clients then connect to it, sending an innocent-looking domain (gmail.com or something) in the TLS SNI header, and then only in the datastream protected by TLS do they expose the tor protocol. This is of course useless against NSA and GCHQ, which have access to all these cloud providers, but it's very useful for example for people behind restrictive country-level firewalls as the authorities are reluctant to block such large services and it's hard for them to distinguish this from normal traffic.

gtf21 11y ago

They couldn't, as this video explains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G8dPAdmyss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G8dPAdmyss If two people really wanted to communicate, they could still do the encryption on paper, and transmit the garbled messages.

Joeboy 11y ago
Spoiler: The video shows two people using a one time pad to communicate. It doesn't show any reason the government can't ban people from doing that, or stop WhatsApp using good encryption in the UK, or throw people in prison for using PGP. Admittedly that's not going to happen in the UK in the near future, but contrary to popular belief there's no reason you can't make maths illegal.
- gtf21 11y ago
  But it's really quite hard to make using a one-time pad illegal, and even harder to make maths illegal, so practically, while they could install all the backdoors in the world, they would struggle, practically, to prevent people ever encrypting anything.
  - Joeboy 11y ago
    I doubt they're that bothered about people using one-time pads on paper. I think they're bothered about encryption becoming sufficiently normal that the stuff they want to see is indistinguishable from cat photos. There are measures they can take (legislative and otherwise) to prevent that scenario happening.
dharma1 11y ago
Paper aside, I don't see how it would be viable for UK to try to enforce back doors all electronics, ban the import of non-back doored electronics, or enforce a ban on encryption software. You can make it illegal but it won't stop people from using it
- Joeboy 11y ago