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I think we in the tech community tend to vastly under-estimate the threat of legal restrictions on encryption. When the public gets scared, they look to govern

I think we in the tech community tend to vastly under-estimate the threat of legal restrictions on encryption. When the public gets scared, they look to governments to "do something", whether that something is really a smart thing or not. If we're unlucky and we get caught unprepared, we run the risk of getting stuck with a backdoor or "exceptional access" mechanism that provides little or no technical safeguards against massive and nearly unlimited government overreach. IMO this makes it our responsibility to figure out how we might design such a system that does have strong protections against misuse. Of course that is a very difficult thing to do. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

strbean 7y ago
I think you'll run into a chicken-and-egg problem here. Without bonafide strong encryption, those strong protections against misuse probably can't exist.
- cvwright 7y ago
  > Without bonafide strong encryption, those strong protections against misuse probably can't exist. Agreed. I actually did some work on this topic that requires having things like strong ciphers and hash functions, and protocols that provide perfect forward secrecy. Our approach was to take strong constructions and turn them into a kind of proof-of-work. So you can recover the key, but to do so you have to expend a huge amount of electricity (ie, money). The idea was partly just to call the bluff of the government types who claim that "exceptional access" is so critical to our safety. If they're not willing to spend the money, then we should not be willing to compromise our security. NOTE: I'm not suggesting that we should actually deploy this kind of thing, as long as we have a choice in the matter. Just that we should be prepared in case we need it. Anyway, the paper is here: C.V. Wright and M. Varia. Crypto Crumple Zones: Enabling Limited Access without Mass Surveillance. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2018. https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf

strbean 7y ago

I think you'll run into a chicken-and-egg problem here. Without bonafide strong encryption, those strong protections against misuse probably can't exist.

cvwright 7y ago
> Without bonafide strong encryption, those strong protections against misuse probably can't exist. Agreed. I actually did some work on this topic that requires having things like strong ciphers and hash functions, and protocols that provide perfect forward secrecy. Our approach was to take strong constructions and turn them into a kind of proof-of-work. So you can recover the key, but to do so you have to expend a huge amount of electricity (ie, money). The idea was partly just to call the bluff of the government types who claim that "exceptional access" is so critical to our safety. If they're not willing to spend the money, then we should not be willing to compromise our security. NOTE: I'm not suggesting that we should actually deploy this kind of thing, as long as we have a choice in the matter. Just that we should be prepared in case we need it. Anyway, the paper is here: C.V. Wright and M. Varia. Crypto Crumple Zones: Enabling Limited Access without Mass Surveillance. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2018. https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf