6 ms·

How did governments lose control of encryption?

33 points by abhi3 11y ago

greggarious 11y ago
They never did. Any other questions there champ?
- mollmerx 11y ago
  They never had control or they never lost it?
  - bekimdisha 11y ago
    never lost it ... why are hoomans still so naive?
    - ska 11y ago
      No idea, but naivety does seems to correlate well with idiosyncratic spelling...
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    Crypto is math. Nobody can monopolize math. edit: On the subject of trying to keep powerful and/or dangerous knowledge locked away from the general public, one of my older HN comments[1] was about the larger, long-term problem our species' rapid access to new knowledge and powerful technology. We need to figure out how to safely integrate new technologies into society asap. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033
    - trhway 11y ago
      it is like any scientific knowledge - ultimately it can't be monopolized/stopped, yet a lot of people can be burned at the stake in the process. It isn't just about Middle Ages - just 60 years ago cybernetics and genetic biology were "false sciences" (with people lives destroyed in various ways [1]) in a nuclear superpower who sent the first satellite&human into space just few years later. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism : "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison or fired or executed as a part of this campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents." [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov... : "Law of large numbers or the idea of random deviation were decreed as "false theories". Statistical journals and university departments were closed; world-renowned statisticians like Andrey Kolmogorov or Eugen Slutsky abandoned statistical research."
    - koolba 11y ago
      > Crypto is math. Nobody can monopolize math. This is pretty damn close though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
    - smacktoward 11y ago
      Governments were plenty able to monopolize math when computing power was scarce and expensive. That monopoly slipped as computer power got cheaper and more widely accessible. Now everybody has a computer in their pocket that's as fast as the world's fastest supercomputers were in 1990, so the monopoly is well and truly dead.
      - pdkl95 11y ago
        They monopolized the people that knew the math, written records that described the math, and the hardware that implemented the math. The actual crypto itself cannot be controlled, and in some cases was found by other through cryptanalysis or independently re-discovered. That distinction is important - physical things like people or papers or computers can be controlled and hidden. It's much harder to keep knowledge itself bottled up, because there is always a risk that someone clever will discover it on their own.
fweespeech 11y ago
> Cryptography was once controlled by the state and deployed only for military and diplomatic ends. But in the 1970s, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie devised a system which took encryption keys away from the state and marked the start of the so-called "Crypto Wars". That is an outright lie and the mere fact that this was published as truth shows the BBC is just a propoganda arm of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25code.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25code.html?_r=0 Hell, we are only just now breaking encryption from the 18th century, ffs. https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/vpns/history-encryption-730 https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/vpns/history-e... > 1500 BC ancient Assyrian merchants used intaglio, a piece of flat stone carved into a collage of images and some writing to identify themselves in trading transactions. Using this mechanism, they are producing what today we know as 'digital signature.' The public knew that a particular 'signature' belonged to this trader, but only he had the intaglio to produce that signature. Using this mechanism, they are producing what today we know as 'digital signature.' The public knew that a particular 'signature' belonged to this trader, but only he had the intaglio to produce that signature. ------ > So what they said is right, if you specifically know they're talking about public key cryptography and know the history of it. It could have been better written. > Secondly they're trying to dumb down the history of public key cryptography, and what they mean by "once controlled by the state" is that James H. Ellis & Clifford Cocks discovered and implemented it in secret for the GCHQ in 1970-73. With Malcolm J. Williamson implementing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange in 1974. William Stanley Jevons basically foreshadowed its existence in the 1800s. There was no way it could be controlled once computers became common. The fact the GCHQ couldn't keep it secret for even 10 years pretty much shows that. They never had control except for the briefest of windows and pretending that was really control of cryptography in any substantial way is crazy.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  > That is an outright lie and the mere fact that this was published as truth shows the BBC is just a propoganda arm of the UK. First off there's absolutely no propaganda benefit in that supposed lie. Secondly they're trying to dumb down the history of public key cryptography, and what they mean by "once controlled by the state" is that James H. Ellis & Clifford Cocks discovered and implemented it in secret for the GCHQ in 1970-73. With Malcolm J. Williamson implementing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange in 1974. In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman released Diffie–Hellman key exchange to the non-classified world. So what they said is right, if you specifically know they're talking about public key cryptography and know the history of it. It could have been better written.
xyzzy4 11y ago
They lost control when they didn't want to legislate anti-encryption laws.
progressive_dad 11y ago
What breaks my heart about this "cold war" becoming a "hot war" is it will probably stifle school age curriculum. If its a hot button political issue then teachers won't be encouraging little johnny and suzie to show the class their nifty secret code they made on the playground. We'll hear a lot of bloviating on how every child should learn to code, but if you point out the creative minds of children are fertile ground for exploring steganography you'll get a resounding laugh and a joke about stegasaurus.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > show the class their nifty secret code Everybody knows nifty secret codes are the gateway hobby to harder technologies like assembling electronic clocks.
  - progressive_dad 11y ago
    Or worse, Navajo indian sympathizers.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  > If its a hot button political issue then teachers won't be encouraging little johnny and suzie to show the class their nifty secret code they made on the playground Since when does this ever happen.
  - progressive_dad 11y ago
    Do you have kids in school? The curriculum is 70% studying for standardized tests and anything else they're lucky enough to get is 20 year old pretty shitty stuff. Go read little house on the prairie again. I bet its in your second or third grade class library. Go read about the "stinky natives" and how they were justified in taking land from the native's reservation. You think they have time to talk about racism in the great plains in their "pioneer" curriculum? Now ask yourself is Mrs. Clarkson is gonna bother talking about anything relevant in math. My colloquial use of "little johnny and suzie creamcheese" was meant to evoke the 1950's and dated ideas about education. But in the 30% time teachers actually get to use to educate they do still try to bring in outside materials. Emphatically! NOT controversial materials.
bekimdisha 11y ago
depends which government you are talking about ;)
graycat 11y ago
Since no doubt governments never were able to find a fast way to factor a product of two large prime numbers, they never did have "control" of encryption.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
The better question is - when did they actually have control of it? They sort-of did - it took government money to put an Enigma together, but government money is only a necessary condition because it's money.
spiralpolitik 11y ago
Never thought I'd see Phil Zimmerman and PGP written out of the history books of the crypto wars but there you go.
- superuser2 11y ago
  I'd say PGP got us to the point where endpoint security matters, and Apple closed the loop. Allegedly that's why they want the phone so badly: to dump data from encrypted messaging apps. The FBI long ago adapted to breaking open general purpose computers that were encrypted by i.e. keeping them awake and logged in through arrest and seizure. PGP won't do you any good there. Apple finally built the walls around the garden high enough (by doing security at the hardware level) that they put up a fight even when the device is on and ready to use.
stegosaurus 11y ago
This article, this headline, is an excellent example of the BBC's bias. How did governments lose control of mathematics? Yes, it sounds absurd, doesn't it? The BBC have an opportunity, some would say an obligation, to educate here.
CM30 11y ago
They lost control when encryption became a product sold on the free market/distributed among communities. The internet only took away that control even more (and faster).
stuaxo 11y ago
The BBCs coverage of this whole thing has been incredibly biased. Although there is much talk of BBC left wing bias, it is massively pro government - and more so in recent years.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- junto 11y ago
  Whilst the BBC is supposed to be non-biased, it is funded by public money. The BBC has to tred carefully around the government and make sure it doesn't upset whoever is currently in power. http://rightdishonourable.com/2015/10/peter-capaldi-the-bbc-is-seriously-under-threat-from-the-government/ http://rightdishonourable.com/2015/10/peter-capaldi-the-bbc-...

33 points by abhi3 11y ago

greggarious 11y ago

They never did. Any other questions there champ?

mollmerx 11y ago
They never had control or they never lost it?
- bekimdisha 11y ago
  never lost it ... why are hoomans still so naive?
  - ska 11y ago
    No idea, but naivety does seems to correlate well with idiosyncratic spelling...
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Crypto is math. Nobody can monopolize math. edit: On the subject of trying to keep powerful and/or dangerous knowledge locked away from the general public, one of my older HN comments[1] was about the larger, long-term problem our species' rapid access to new knowledge and powerful technology. We need to figure out how to safely integrate new technologies into society asap. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033
  - trhway 11y ago
    it is like any scientific knowledge - ultimately it can't be monopolized/stopped, yet a lot of people can be burned at the stake in the process. It isn't just about Middle Ages - just 60 years ago cybernetics and genetic biology were "false sciences" (with people lives destroyed in various ways [1]) in a nuclear superpower who sent the first satellite&human into space just few years later. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism : "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison or fired or executed as a part of this campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents." [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov... : "Law of large numbers or the idea of random deviation were decreed as "false theories". Statistical journals and university departments were closed; world-renowned statisticians like Andrey Kolmogorov or Eugen Slutsky abandoned statistical research."
  - koolba 11y ago
    > Crypto is math. Nobody can monopolize math. This is pretty damn close though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    Governments were plenty able to monopolize math when computing power was scarce and expensive. That monopoly slipped as computer power got cheaper and more widely accessible. Now everybody has a computer in their pocket that's as fast as the world's fastest supercomputers were in 1990, so the monopoly is well and truly dead.
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      They monopolized the people that knew the math, written records that described the math, and the hardware that implemented the math. The actual crypto itself cannot be controlled, and in some cases was found by other through cryptanalysis or independently re-discovered. That distinction is important - physical things like people or papers or computers can be controlled and hidden. It's much harder to keep knowledge itself bottled up, because there is always a risk that someone clever will discover it on their own.

fweespeech 11y ago

> Cryptography was once controlled by the state and deployed only for military and diplomatic ends. But in the 1970s, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie devised a system which took encryption keys away from the state and marked the start of the so-called "Crypto Wars". That is an outright lie and the mere fact that this was published as truth shows the BBC is just a propoganda arm of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25code.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25code.html?_r=0 Hell, we are only just now breaking encryption from the 18th century, ffs. https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/vpns/history-encryption-730 https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/vpns/history-e... > 1500 BC ancient Assyrian merchants used intaglio, a piece of flat stone carved into a collage of images and some writing to identify themselves in trading transactions. Using this mechanism, they are producing what today we know as 'digital signature.' The public knew that a particular 'signature' belonged to this trader, but only he had the intaglio to produce that signature. Using this mechanism, they are producing what today we know as 'digital signature.' The public knew that a particular 'signature' belonged to this trader, but only he had the intaglio to produce that signature. ------ > So what they said is right, if you specifically know they're talking about public key cryptography and know the history of it. It could have been better written. > Secondly they're trying to dumb down the history of public key cryptography, and what they mean by "once controlled by the state" is that James H. Ellis & Clifford Cocks discovered and implemented it in secret for the GCHQ in 1970-73. With Malcolm J. Williamson implementing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange in 1974. William Stanley Jevons basically foreshadowed its existence in the 1800s. There was no way it could be controlled once computers became common. The fact the GCHQ couldn't keep it secret for even 10 years pretty much shows that. They never had control except for the briefest of windows and pretending that was really control of cryptography in any substantial way is crazy.

Someone1234 11y ago
> That is an outright lie and the mere fact that this was published as truth shows the BBC is just a propoganda arm of the UK. First off there's absolutely no propaganda benefit in that supposed lie. Secondly they're trying to dumb down the history of public key cryptography, and what they mean by "once controlled by the state" is that James H. Ellis & Clifford Cocks discovered and implemented it in secret for the GCHQ in 1970-73. With Malcolm J. Williamson implementing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange in 1974. In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman released Diffie–Hellman key exchange to the non-classified world. So what they said is right, if you specifically know they're talking about public key cryptography and know the history of it. It could have been better written.

xyzzy4 11y ago

They lost control when they didn't want to legislate anti-encryption laws.

progressive_dad 11y ago

What breaks my heart about this "cold war" becoming a "hot war" is it will probably stifle school age curriculum. If its a hot button political issue then teachers won't be encouraging little johnny and suzie to show the class their nifty secret code they made on the playground. We'll hear a lot of bloviating on how every child should learn to code, but if you point out the creative minds of children are fertile ground for exploring steganography you'll get a resounding laugh and a joke about stegasaurus.

pdkl95 11y ago
> show the class their nifty secret code Everybody knows nifty secret codes are the gateway hobby to harder technologies like assembling electronic clocks.
- progressive_dad 11y ago
  Or worse, Navajo indian sympathizers.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
> If its a hot button political issue then teachers won't be encouraging little johnny and suzie to show the class their nifty secret code they made on the playground Since when does this ever happen.
- progressive_dad 11y ago
  Do you have kids in school? The curriculum is 70% studying for standardized tests and anything else they're lucky enough to get is 20 year old pretty shitty stuff. Go read little house on the prairie again. I bet its in your second or third grade class library. Go read about the "stinky natives" and how they were justified in taking land from the native's reservation. You think they have time to talk about racism in the great plains in their "pioneer" curriculum? Now ask yourself is Mrs. Clarkson is gonna bother talking about anything relevant in math. My colloquial use of "little johnny and suzie creamcheese" was meant to evoke the 1950's and dated ideas about education. But in the 30% time teachers actually get to use to educate they do still try to bring in outside materials. Emphatically! NOT controversial materials.

bekimdisha 11y ago

depends which government you are talking about ;)

graycat 11y ago

Since no doubt governments never were able to find a fast way to factor a product of two large prime numbers, they never did have "control" of encryption.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

The better question is - when did they actually have control of it? They sort-of did - it took government money to put an Enigma together, but government money is only a necessary condition because it's money.

spiralpolitik 11y ago

Never thought I'd see Phil Zimmerman and PGP written out of the history books of the crypto wars but there you go.

superuser2 11y ago
I'd say PGP got us to the point where endpoint security matters, and Apple closed the loop. Allegedly that's why they want the phone so badly: to dump data from encrypted messaging apps. The FBI long ago adapted to breaking open general purpose computers that were encrypted by i.e. keeping them awake and logged in through arrest and seizure. PGP won't do you any good there. Apple finally built the walls around the garden high enough (by doing security at the hardware level) that they put up a fight even when the device is on and ready to use.

stegosaurus 11y ago

This article, this headline, is an excellent example of the BBC's bias. How did governments lose control of mathematics? Yes, it sounds absurd, doesn't it? The BBC have an opportunity, some would say an obligation, to educate here.

CM30 11y ago

They lost control when encryption became a product sold on the free market/distributed among communities. The internet only took away that control even more (and faster).

stuaxo 11y ago

The BBCs coverage of this whole thing has been incredibly biased. Although there is much talk of BBC left wing bias, it is massively pro government - and more so in recent years.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
junto 11y ago
Whilst the BBC is supposed to be non-biased, it is funded by public money. The BBC has to tred carefully around the government and make sure it doesn't upset whoever is currently in power. http://rightdishonourable.com/2015/10/peter-capaldi-the-bbc-is-seriously-under-threat-from-the-government/ http://rightdishonourable.com/2015/10/peter-capaldi-the-bbc-...