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The article seems to make the fundamental error of assuming that there is any middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all". If

by zyxley 10y ago

The article seems to make the fundamental error of assuming that there is any middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all". If crypto can be broken, it will be broken, whether that's by state actors or by some kid in Mongolia who wants to make a quick buck by ransoming all your files.

omginternets 10y ago
I read this a bit differently, i.e.: "unbreakable crypto is necessary but not sufficient" && "unbreakable crypto alone has a paradoxical effect of decreasing privacy through political means."
mike_hearn 10y ago
Because it's not a fundamental error or indeed an error at all. What you've just expressed is one of those fascinating pieces of mental junk that clutters up social groups, a political desire that's so strongly held you've managed to rationalise to yourself that it's a fact and not a personal desire at all. But it's still not a fact. It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. In fact it's almost the default: • Client-to-server encryption with central message routing is "unbreakable" against neighbours, friends, your employer (when not using their equipment) and most importantly criminals, but is easily accessed by any police officer who can serve a warrant on the provider. • Disk encryption enforced by secure hardware like iOS, Android, BitLocker etc can easily be given a backdoor by the manufacturers. It's only a few pages of extra code at most. And that's about it for "mainstream use of crypto up to about 3 years ago" right? It's only since Apple and Facebook started refusing to unlock devices and claiming (wrongly) they have end-to-end encrypted their service so they can no longer comply with warrants that this situation has changed. That's not even including other techniques like key escrow, the dual-EC RNG that the NSA was pushing (with the interesting fillip that it's got a cryptographically strong "unbreakable" backdoor!) and a whole host of other tricks that aren't really used much (we think). PHK's article even spells this out for you - Kazakhstan breaks the supposedly unbreakable TLS by simply insisting everyone configure their computer to allow them that ability, a feature well intended by the TLS designers. The truth is that there's a vast middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all" and it is in that middle ground the virtually all services we use today sit. Enough crypto is used to keep out ordinary criminals and snoops, but not enough is used to keep out determined governments with jurisdiction. The point the author is making is that attempting to pursue the ideal of unbreakable crypto (a) won't work and (b) will actually end up making privacy worse for everyone.
- nightcracker 10y ago
  If there is a backdoor, that backdoor can be used by anyone that has the key. I do not trust a government to responsibly handle such a key, as it leaking once results in total failure of security for everyone. A backdoored crypto system is a broken crypto system.
  - coldcode 10y ago
    A backdoored crypto system is a no crypto system.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    You can always mitigate the "failure for everyone" scenario. Plethora of government keys, for example, or rotating government keys, or rapidly expiring government keys... Anyway, they've managed to keep stacks and stacks of information secret for decades and decades. It seems like it could be managed. No one has stolen the cert for *.whitehouse.gov. Sidenote, why do people call a second key a backdoor? To me, backdoor suggests exploit, not used-as-designed.
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      Because it involves trusting that no one made copies of the key, turning a locked door into a backdoor? Your mitigation ideas are sound though, and could also be used as a kind of rolling canary trap.
  - mike_hearn 10y ago
    There are lots of examples of governments maintaining the integrity of keys over the long term. The e-Passport system is an example of that. Another would be that the NSA had the ultimate insider hack - literally a sysadmin who dumped their entire internal wikis and document stores - and yet it appears that no key material was compromised. You can repeat "a backdoored system is no system" mantra to yourself if you like, but there are a LOT of threats that aren't governments and those are the ones people tend to care about the most.
mirhagk 10y ago
Not necessarily. You don't need to introduce compromised crypto (that's exactly the problem that's happening currently). I think the point of the article more shows that by using TLS everywhere the government is incentivized to attack it a lot more. This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.
hx87 10y ago
That's like saying there is no middle ground between product X being free and being infinitely expensive. Even if product X has a price I can afford, I have to consider the trade-offs between buying it and other uses for my money. If it's free, though, there are no trade-offs. If somebody can break my crypto, fine, but I want them to expend valuable resources on it so they won't do it for shits and giggles.

by zyxley 10y ago

omginternets 10y ago

I read this a bit differently, i.e.: "unbreakable crypto is necessary but not sufficient" && "unbreakable crypto alone has a paradoxical effect of decreasing privacy through political means."

mike_hearn 10y ago

Because it's not a fundamental error or indeed an error at all. What you've just expressed is one of those fascinating pieces of mental junk that clutters up social groups, a political desire that's so strongly held you've managed to rationalise to yourself that it's a fact and not a personal desire at all. But it's still not a fact. It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. In fact it's almost the default: • Client-to-server encryption with central message routing is "unbreakable" against neighbours, friends, your employer (when not using their equipment) and most importantly criminals, but is easily accessed by any police officer who can serve a warrant on the provider. • Disk encryption enforced by secure hardware like iOS, Android, BitLocker etc can easily be given a backdoor by the manufacturers. It's only a few pages of extra code at most. And that's about it for "mainstream use of crypto up to about 3 years ago" right? It's only since Apple and Facebook started refusing to unlock devices and claiming (wrongly) they have end-to-end encrypted their service so they can no longer comply with warrants that this situation has changed. That's not even including other techniques like key escrow, the dual-EC RNG that the NSA was pushing (with the interesting fillip that it's got a cryptographically strong "unbreakable" backdoor!) and a whole host of other tricks that aren't really used much (we think). PHK's article even spells this out for you - Kazakhstan breaks the supposedly unbreakable TLS by simply insisting everyone configure their computer to allow them that ability, a feature well intended by the TLS designers. The truth is that there's a vast middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all" and it is in that middle ground the virtually all services we use today sit. Enough crypto is used to keep out ordinary criminals and snoops, but not enough is used to keep out determined governments with jurisdiction. The point the author is making is that attempting to pursue the ideal of unbreakable crypto (a) won't work and (b) will actually end up making privacy worse for everyone.

nightcracker 10y ago
If there is a backdoor, that backdoor can be used by anyone that has the key. I do not trust a government to responsibly handle such a key, as it leaking once results in total failure of security for everyone. A backdoored crypto system is a broken crypto system.
- coldcode 10y ago
  A backdoored crypto system is a no crypto system.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  You can always mitigate the "failure for everyone" scenario. Plethora of government keys, for example, or rotating government keys, or rapidly expiring government keys... Anyway, they've managed to keep stacks and stacks of information secret for decades and decades. It seems like it could be managed. No one has stolen the cert for *.whitehouse.gov. Sidenote, why do people call a second key a backdoor? To me, backdoor suggests exploit, not used-as-designed.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Because it involves trusting that no one made copies of the key, turning a locked door into a backdoor? Your mitigation ideas are sound though, and could also be used as a kind of rolling canary trap.
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  There are lots of examples of governments maintaining the integrity of keys over the long term. The e-Passport system is an example of that. Another would be that the NSA had the ultimate insider hack - literally a sysadmin who dumped their entire internal wikis and document stores - and yet it appears that no key material was compromised. You can repeat "a backdoored system is no system" mantra to yourself if you like, but there are a LOT of threats that aren't governments and those are the ones people tend to care about the most.

mirhagk 10y ago

Not necessarily. You don't need to introduce compromised crypto (that's exactly the problem that's happening currently). I think the point of the article more shows that by using TLS everywhere the government is incentivized to attack it a lot more. This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.

hx87 10y ago

That's like saying there is no middle ground between product X being free and being infinitely expensive. Even if product X has a price I can afford, I have to consider the trade-offs between buying it and other uses for my money. If it's free, though, there are no trade-offs. If somebody can break my crypto, fine, but I want them to expend valuable resources on it so they won't do it for shits and giggles.