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The right way to deal with this is to set up your system such that you can't turn over customer data because it's encrypted with a key to which only the custome
by gozur88 11y ago
The right way to deal with this is to set up your system such that you can't turn over customer data because it's encrypted with a key to which only the customer access.
- rodgerd 11y agoAnd then you get legislation requiring backdoors. People need to get their head around the back that this is a political problem and requires political solutions.
- cschep 11y agosurely you agree that this puts the feds in a much tougher spot though? I think we should try to get from a 4 to 5, even if we can't get all the way to 10 right away. We shouldn't just punt on the problem because it's not possible to have an immediately perfect solution. 4 to 5 might mean using keys that only the customer has access to. 7 through 10 might all be political, sure, but let's keep moving.
- ivl 11y agoHad the feds not been so abusive, many of the people who are completely lawful wouldn't be at the point of being okay with the feds having a hard time. I think going tit for tat would be fine, but I totally understand why some people are saying "okay, screw it, we'll just make something no one can get into".
- cschep 11y agoTotally agree! I think we should build impossible to access things AND be actively political. :)
- gozur88 11y agoWell, maybe, but you deal with the legal environment in which you find yourself. Right now, there's no such requirement. You could probably get around one, too, by selling pieces of the system and having the customer use OSS for the rest. That is, sell storage and key dongles while pointing your customer to front end software. The same way they used to sell crushed grapes during prohibition.
- arkadiyt 11y agoThis is precisely what the Burr-Feinstein bill that was just introduced would require - providing access to the government no matter what, even if you have deployed end-to-end encryption. rodgerd is correct, this is a political problem.
- meric 11y agoIf you and your friend have previously exchanged public/private key pairs and used gmail to transfer encrypted messages, (which is what parent is referring to about providing service to only one part of the process) the government cannot impose anything on gmail to hand over your actual message.
- Spooky23 11y agoNo, but they will charge you with something.
- loup-vaillant 11y agoThe current wording of the bill states that you have to hand over the keys to data you have encrypted. If the provider doesn't encrypt anything (which is the case with end-to-end encryption), then it doesn't have to hand over anything.
- jaegerpicker 11y agoSure but that doesn't stop the government from charging me (the sender/receiver) with illegally encrypting communication which the bill looks like it could provide. It's a political problem because NO ONE should be charged with using math. When you consider how badly all computer crime laws are enforced, I think that fighting the bill via political methods is the only safe way forward.
- meric 11y ago
- jfoutz 11y agoWhy host in the US?
- esbranson 11y agoBetter the devil you know than the devil you don't. The US laws in practice get a lot of exposure and a lot of scrutiny worldwide.
- gozur88 11y agoI wonder how true that is. There seems to be a whole lot of people in recent years who've been ordered, by a judge, not to talk about something a three letter agency is doing. In theory that judge is supposed to make sure the law is being followed. My impression, though, is that some judges have a much more expansive view of government power than I think is warranted.
- rodgerd 11y agoWhere are you going to host, then? None of the Five Eyes countries, so that rules out the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. (Indeed, New Zealand is ahead of the totalitarian curve here, with proposals to give blanket exemptions to any law broken by the security services as long as they claim they had a good faith belief they needed to). France? Much worse history on encryption than the US. Germany? Officially better, but the intelligence services have been revealed to be essentially ignoring German law when it gets in the way of working with their US counterparts. And so on and so forth.
- dredmorbius 11y agoI say both. Governments can be limited by legal constructs. Non-governmental actors, or government actors from other jurisdictions, cannot. Crypto and legislative reform are mutually reinforcing bulwarks.
- thegenius2000 11y agoThen open source the system from the beginning, so you literally lack the ability to insert secret backdoors.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoI wonder if the end result is just going to be mass production and adoption of memory, drives, etc that physically self-destruct. A combination of Apple's Touch ID as a fail-deadly switch, and physical destruction would just end this.
- derefr 11y agoOne kind-of-nice thing about firmware-level-encrypted SSDs, is that you don't need to overwrite every block on them to "secure wipe" them. When you send the drive an "erase yourself fully" command, it just securely overwrites the sector containing the encryption key with a new one. In terms of getting access to the rest of the data at that point, you've effectively just blown up the drive. People think there's no point to hardware drive encryption, because they look at it wrong; they think it's meant to protect your data in the same way that OS-level user-passphrase-derived-master-key drive encryption is. But it's not about "unlocking" the drive at all; it's really about this exact command, where you can change the key and thus, in an instant, permanently garble all the data on the drive. (It's is also extremely necessary if you want computer refurbishers to be able to reuse SSDs. Trying to "securely overwrite" all the blocks on an SSD is both impossible at an OS level—some blocks are just unaddressible overprovisioned blocks that only come online when other blocks fail—and devastating at a physical level: the write multiplication of running e.g. DBaN on an SSD would completely burn out the disk. Overwriting the key, meanwhile, is a single write.)
- Aelinsaar 11y agoAhhh... that's smart.
- orbitingpluto 11y agoPlease tell me that was an intentional pun, Agent 99.
- Aelinsaar 11y agotalks into shoe
- rryan 11y agoNo, that doesn't work. c.f. Lavabit and "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
- conorgil145 11y agoLava Bit was not actually architected in such a way that only the customer could read the emails even though it made that claim: https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit-critique/ https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit-critique/
- e12e 11y agoHowever, it would be hard to see how Microsoft could architect things that way too -- they supply an Operating System with constant security updates...
- rryan 11y agoLet's say it was -- how could you, the end user, go about evaluating that claim? Even if the perfect technical solution existed, it wouldn't fix this problem.
- studentrob 11y agoYeah, technical solutions alone are not the answer. There's still the $5 wrench, or in the government's case, the threat of jail time for contempt of court should a real encryption bill pass. To really protect the right to free speech we need both technical tools that are easy for everyone to verify, and a society who believes laws banning encryption are worthless. Anything short of that is a risk that we flop into a state that is afraid of words.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- duaneb 11y agoThis should not have come as a surprise to anyone relying on encryption to maintain privacy, e.g. Snowden. Email simply does not support this without PGP.
- nxzero 11y agoMaybe I'm jaded, but given Microsoft's history, it's unclear why anyone would ever trust them, regardless of what they say or do publicly.
- someear 11y agocurious to know what kind of trust you're talking about. Trust that they're being genuine here, or trust that they could protect your data?
- nxzero 11y agoMicrosoft is in the pocket, so to speak, and has been for a long-time.
- aryehof 11y agoMention Microsoft and we always get someone that can't see past their bigotry in order to actually address the issue being discussed.
- danieldk 11y agoI don't think it's fair to classify your parent poster as "someone that can't see past their bigotry". There are serious issues, like Microsoft opening up a large surface for state fishing expeditions, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Privacy_and_data_collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Privacy_and_data_co... or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype#Security_and_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype#Security_and_privacy (I agree that it is good that Microsoft makes this move now.)
- nxzero 11y agoList is long, and much of it, likely not generally know. Beyond just that Microsoft's actions were not done for the greater good, but to unjustifiably enrich and entrench itself.
- braderhart 11y agoHow do you ensure encryption when something is closed source?
- detaro 11y agoAnd loose most of your customers because your products are too complicated to use. (Not saying there isn't market for it. But it is not the mass market Microsoft probably is after) Easy web access etc don't work without the service provider being able to get the data.
- HappyTypist 11y agoIt depends. Both iMessage and Whatsapp, two of the largest messaging apps, are end to end encrypted.
- detaro 11y agoWhen I think Microsoft services I think more Outlook/Office 365/OneDrive, but you are right. Skype certainly could/should be e2e.
- frik 11y agoMicrosoft shouldn't collect that much consumer data in the first place to begin with. Their tracking and spying that cannot be turned off in their most recent product version is not fine, it's a show stopper.
- desbest 11y agoWhat if someone forgets their password? Then they can't access their email account again.