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There may be technological solutions to this. Say your encrypted files need two secrets, one in your possession, one in possession of a third party. To decryp
by jknz 8y ago
There may be technological solutions to this.
Say your encrypted files need two secrets, one in your possession, one in possession of a third party.
To decrypt your file, use your secret and ask the third party for their secret. To get their part of the secret, either call them or type a password or use some other private key. It can be automatic and fast.
The role of the third party is to block the secret retrieval at any suspicion of law enforcement involvement. Second secret then cannot be retrieved and the files are safe.
Also, if you type the wrong password, the third party blocks retrieval and will reactivate it after investigating whether you are in law enforcement company.
Law enforcement may try to compel the third party to give the second secret. Having third party in another country, or multiple third parties in multiple countries may solve this.
Another idea is that the third party is your lawyer. You shared that second secret with your lawyer and told him to stop sharing or destroy the second secret if you ever meet law enforcement.
You get arrested, stay silent, your lawyer is called; before anything else the lawyer blocks retrieval of the second secret. This may be attorney/client privilege and would block law enforcement from compelling the lawyer to give the second secret.
Add some randomness (retrieval of second secret gets blocked with probability 1/10 when the correct password is entered) to get plausible deniability.
Some people could be interesting to pay Apple a lot to implement this. Or some law firms could start selling such lawyer phones.
Edit: typos, last sentence
- rlpb 8y ago> Another idea is that the third party is your lawyer. Then that isn't your lawyer; rather your co-conspirator. I'm pretty sure that if you're in a conspiracy with your "lawyer", you'll be charged together and you'll need another actual lawyer to represent you.
- commandlinefan 8y agoThat's called "key escrow" - they tried that with the Clipper chip back in the 90's. It was mostly rejected because nobody trusted the third parties - and in hindsight, they were correct not to.