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Agree 100% about carefully considering consequences of crafting a skeleton key into our most prized technologies. The tech community, at least the most vocal s

by gtcode 9y ago

Agree 100% about carefully considering consequences of crafting a skeleton key into our most prized technologies. The tech community, at least the most vocal subset in these parts, can keep pushing back against LE's cries for such a key, and it's clear there is merit to such an argument. It just seems to be somewhat provincial from a neutral perspective, however. Taken from the "other side", it does not seem universally true that generally deployed strong, unbreakable encryption built into "secure" general-purpose commodity hardware is in the best interests of humanity going forward. It seems to be an open question. It was nice to see rational/objective/neutral discourse on HN in the past that considered all sides. But, such a universal perspective seems to be missing of late, and the more recent parochial attitude seems a natural form of pushback, given the current chaos. Hopefully good comes of this. "Snow Dawg" is currently partaking in thoughtful discussion arguing against NSA's policies on his twitter, if anyone is interested.

nitrogen 9y ago
What you describe as "neutral" is a false compromise between the reality of technology and math, and the inanity of thinking a backdoor is a good idea.
- gtcode 9y ago
  No, that's not true, the argument for a backdoor isn't purely technical. LE's perspective is almost certainly predicated on a universal (amongst the good) desire to reduce suffering. This part is downplayed or ignored. Can you prove that there is no such thing as a "perfect" backdoor? Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key? Has this been formally proven? That might be a good starting point, and I apologize if my understanding is wrong, but can't one build a skeleton key into encryption that cannot be broken with any greater likelihood than otherwise would be possible by compromising the encryption itself? If the surface area of attack is doubled at most, that seems a viable trade-off. Yes, it's potentially a huge SPOF if designed sub-optimally (I'd suspect that there is a way to build something akin to a one-time use set of segregated skeleton keys), but that risk needs management like all risks. (redact)
  - Stefan-H 9y ago
    "Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key?" The fact that losing the key is a possibility is risk enough. Once PFS is implemented, the only way (barring crypto attacks) you can break an TLS session secured with it is to have compromised the systems at the time of the communication. A skeleton key now means that there is a possibility of offline decryption with just having a copy of the communication and the skeleton key. This key is handled by humans now, instead of machines and a protocol. That is far more than double the attack surface area.

by gtcode 9y ago

nitrogen 9y ago

What you describe as "neutral" is a false compromise between the reality of technology and math, and the inanity of thinking a backdoor is a good idea.

gtcode 9y ago
No, that's not true, the argument for a backdoor isn't purely technical. LE's perspective is almost certainly predicated on a universal (amongst the good) desire to reduce suffering. This part is downplayed or ignored. Can you prove that there is no such thing as a "perfect" backdoor? Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key? Has this been formally proven? That might be a good starting point, and I apologize if my understanding is wrong, but can't one build a skeleton key into encryption that cannot be broken with any greater likelihood than otherwise would be possible by compromising the encryption itself? If the surface area of attack is doubled at most, that seems a viable trade-off. Yes, it's potentially a huge SPOF if designed sub-optimally (I'd suspect that there is a way to build something akin to a one-time use set of segregated skeleton keys), but that risk needs management like all risks. (redact)
- Stefan-H 9y ago
  "Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key?" The fact that losing the key is a possibility is risk enough. Once PFS is implemented, the only way (barring crypto attacks) you can break an TLS session secured with it is to have compromised the systems at the time of the communication. A skeleton key now means that there is a possibility of offline decryption with just having a copy of the communication and the skeleton key. This key is handled by humans now, instead of machines and a protocol. That is far more than double the attack surface area.