9 ms·

Hi! Nice to meet you. I think (some of) what the FBI is asking for lately is actually not that unreasonable -- assuming we could do it right. Chris Wray, lik

• Jotra7 9y ago
  What do boots taste like, friend?
• yarrel 9y ago
  "But suppose we could construct a truly limited mechanism that would give them the ability to recover only a small amount of encrypted data. " Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Oh wait you're serious.
  • d4mi3n 9y ago
    Parent seems to be trying to encourage some real discussion on this topic. For those of us not well versed in crypto, could you elaborate on why this is problematic rather than being dismissive? Why is this not possible? How could we improve the situation? What are the risks?
    • echlebek 9y ago
      Suppose some system like this is actually possible and not just fiction. Then, the FBI still doesn't need it, because the legal system already has a way to address this problem. Warrants.
      • heartles 9y ago
        Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed the criteria for "exceptional criminal investigations" included the obtaining of a warrant to access said data. Suppose some magical system like this was possible "breakable encryption, but only in the presence of a warrant". What are the arguments against this?
        • natch 9y ago
          What if corrupt, evil, law enforcement working with corrupt, evil, judges are able to issue warrants and read whatever they want, whenever they want? How is that a good thing? Please explain.
          • lern_too_spel 9y ago
            This is the way things have worked since the United States was formed and is written into the Constitution. Do you actually think the justice system should not have the ability to use warrants? Then you need to change the Constitution.
            • natch 9y ago
              It needs to work for all countries, not just the US. Please continue your explanation.
              • lern_too_spel 9y ago
                All countries with a government have a warrant system. Please explain your point.
  • FilterSweep 9y ago
    > "Idea: Make brute force key recovery possible but very expensive" My eyes glazed over. Quantum computing isn't a fantasy realm, and non-quantum processors are still improving.
  • dang 9y ago
    This comment broke the HN guidelines badly. Please don't push discussions into the internet swamp here. If someone is misinformed, you can correct them in a way that teaches the rest of us something, too. You can also just post nothing. But please don't post uncivilly or unsubstantively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• jobu 9y ago
  From your link: "And so the public policy debate around encryption has been framed as a binary choice between two absolutist positions: either we allow law enforcement no access at all to encrypted data, or we must effectively give them complete, unrestricted access to all our communications" Most people support giving some level of data access to law enforcement, but the problem is that there's no way to restrict it to just law enforcement. As soon as we give one person or group access to the data, then we've effectively given everyone access to that data. Perhaps there was more in the presentation, but this is the only idea I see in the slides: "Idea: Make brute force key recovery possible but very expensive" Again, that assumes governments that actually follow rule of law, but any criminal is going to use stolen credit cards to rent for servers in the cloud (or a hacked bot farm) and crack that encryption at no cost to themselves.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • cvwright 9y ago
    > Perhaps there was more in the presentation Yeah sorry, the TED-like format at Enigma makes the slides by themselves fairly useless. OTOH, it also lends itself somewhat easily to posting the talk on Twitter, with text attached to each slide. So I did that. https://twitter.com/hackermath/status/956617943768481792 https://twitter.com/hackermath/status/956617943768481792
• iaw 9y ago
  Original poster (emphasis mine): > I have never met anyone who understands what cryptography is, and supports the FBI. Your reply: > I think (some of) what the FBI is asking for lately is actually not that unreasonable -- assuming we could do it right. ... suppose we could construct a truly limited mechanism that would give them the ability to recover only a small amount of encrypted data. One precludes the other...
  • nyolfen 9y ago
    i don't know about you but i'm willing to give the computer science professor who gave the presentation at a security conference the benefit of the doubt about understanding encryption
    • philipwhiuk 9y ago
      He specifically says "assuming we could do it right." We can't.
      • cvwright 9y ago
        Math is hard. Let's go shopping!
      • Zigurd 9y ago
        Moreover he has no response to the question of how to scale the idea of "expensive to break" into even the near future. And then he is aggrieved and asks for "proof of impossibility" never mind the more fundamental problem with that ask, it's not something his suggestion even approaches needing. It's trivially insecure. He has done nothing to suggest that the assumption that "we could do it right" holds water. And who is "we?" Even "we" is a tendentious notion.
        • cvwright 9y ago
          > how to scale the idea of "expensive to break" into even the near future This part isn't actually that hard. Suppose your computation costs $1M now, and Moore's Law continues doubling computation per watt every 18 months for the foreseeable future. Then in 15 years, the same computation will cost 1/1024 as much as it does today. So you're paying about $1000 per message for 15-year-old data. In 30 years, you'll be paying about $1 per message for 30-year-old data. Is that good enough? It totally depends. For most messages, it's almost certainly fine, because the value of the message decays over time. For other messages that hold their value, you need to set the initial cost higher. The formula above shows how you could that to achieve a certain cost at a time a certain number of years in the future. As to the rest of your comment - this is not how we do science (or engineering). If we cried and gave up every time we encountered a hard problem, we'd still be living in caves, hitting each other with rocks.
• SheinhardtWigCo 9y ago
  Your talk was excellent, kudos to you for being willing to present a controversial idea to an audience that is instinctively hostile to any intentional weakening of crypto. It was certainly a hot topic at lunch. My primary concern and others’ was that strong crypto is already out there and can’t ever be taken away. I understand that you’re choosing to hand-wave over this for the sake of bringing a novel idea to the table, but I’d say it’s a fundamental flaw that can only be addressed by not only outlawing strong crypto in every country, but also finding a way to prevent criminals from implementing and using algorithms that have been known for a while now. That seems, to say the least, quite hard.
  • cvwright 9y ago
    Thanks for the kind words. We're trying to get a productive discussion started, so hopefully we can reduce the risk of ever getting stuck with something truly horrible like mandated backdoors or key escrow. Re: strong crypto can't be taken away - That's very true. I guess it depends on what threat model Wray is hoping to go after. At least until a few years ago, the terrorists weren't even using encryption -- they were posting publicly about their upcoming attacks on Facebook! There was this awkward period of a couple of years where, after every attack, the authorities would claim there was encryption preventing them from stopping the attack. Then some days later, we came to find out that the attacker was already known to them and had been communicating in the clear! So I think if Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, ..., all moved to some very-very-expensive-but-breakable model, that would cover most of the guys doing knife and gun attacks, truck bombs, etc. in the real world.
    • naasking 9y ago
      > So I think if Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, ..., all moved to some very-very-expensive-but-breakable model, that would cover most of the guys doing knife and gun attacks, truck bombs, etc. in the real world. Doubtful. There are enough privacy obsessed computer scientists that oprn source, secure alternatives would soon crop up. Then you're criminalizing perfectly legal behaviour (programming) just because it indirectly might help some criminals.
• Spooky23 9y ago
  Exceptional circumstances are a problem no matter what. Say they were serious about that. Why should the police only be able to search a phone for a terrorism investigation? If I or someone who I cared about was murdered, raped, burgled, etc, I would resent being a second class victim, unable to get justice. Your approach is interesting. Some things on my phone are my personal papers and effects. Other things are just metadata or other incidental information. There's room for grey.
  • philipwhiuk 9y ago
    Who decides what's "metadata". Even with TLS you can still workout what site someone's visiting because the hostname is exposed by SNI (and if it's not SNI, then it's a single IP per hostname so you can just check it). The hostname tells you when someone's visiting a rape counselling forum or a STI website or a whistleblowing site. It tells you what their political perspective is, their media landscape. That's data the FBI can already get.
• benchaney 9y ago
  > But suppose we could construct a truly limited mechanism that would give them the ability to recover only a small amount of encrypted data. Do you believe that this is actually possible? How? I ask because this being doable is crux of your argument, and every proposal I have seen falls laughably short.
  • cvwright 9y ago
    If you had asked me if single-server private information retrieval was possible, I'd have said no until I read papers on single-server PIR. If you had asked me if oblivious RAM were possible, I'd have said no until I read papers on ORAM. I think we could do a lot more than we are now.
• jhayward 9y ago
  > Do they really want only a limited ability to access encrypted data? Again, I don't know. These arguments were all hashed out in the 1990's CALEA discussions. Assertions were made to "Trust Us", only limited use of the automated phone tapping requirements are envisioned. A few years later the CALEA technical requirements for tapping capacity were published. If I recall correctly (these are old bits), the capacity for the number of concurrent taps the FBI required for Manhattan was approximately the number of simultaneous off-hook phone lines expected for that size population. In other words, "capture it all". That's how "limited use" tends to go.
  • cvwright 9y ago
    Yeah it's never going to work if the approach is "trust us" or any kind of "limited use" that requires restraint from the humans supposedly being limited. We need strong technical limitations, on par with the strength of the crypto we use today.
• Zigurd 9y ago
  As with most arguments of this nature it sounds OK-ish until it gets concrete. There is no way to scale the cost of cracking encryption to future computing capability. It's like saying "A terabyte! Consumers will never be able to store a terabyte!" Widespread cracking of 10 year old encryption would be a security disaster, which is why cryptographers think in terms of astronomical numbers, not earthly scales. Lastly, why, given their track record, are you willing to take US law enforcement at their word? Do they deserve that consideration? Like any potentially deadly tool, law enforcement has to be approached with caution.
• philipwhiuk 9y ago
  Who would be allowed? Every FBI agent? Just the chief? Even if you could restrict it - thousands of government related figures in the FBI, NSA, DHS, TSA and elsewhere would want the key.
  • cvwright 9y ago
    Well, the one idea we have now is to limit it to whoever can authorize spending thousands or millions of dollars in electricity to solve a computational puzzle that recovers the key. In practice, I'd like to see it require judicial oversight to release the funds.
    • yarrel 9y ago
      How will you ensure that botnets are brought under judicial oversight?
  • StanislavPetrov 9y ago
    That entirely misses the point. The whole idea behind the existence of a "key" means that the key can either be mishandled, stolen, or independently discovered, rendering cryptography inherently insecure.
• pikchurn 9y ago
  We previously allowed them access to private records with a system of due process involving judges granting warrants on a case by case basis. Instead of following the intent of the law, or even the letter of the law, they recorded everything using either robo-signed warrants or retroactive warrants when they actually needed to make legal use of the information. It was a framework of reasonable judicial oversight and what we got was totalitarian surveillance. The problem is that law enforcement, spooks, and the judicial system are all on the same side and see themselves that way. You can want a system of due process, but you won't get it. Fool me once...