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What does a ban on encryption even look like? If they see unidentifiable traffic in your ISP logs you're illegally using encryption? What would be allowed and w
by Underphil 5y ago
What does a ban on encryption even look like? If they see unidentifiable traffic in your ISP logs you're illegally using encryption? What would be allowed and what wouldn't? Is devising a code with the recipient in the real-world and using that in a messaging tool considered E2EE and therefore banned? Do both endpoints have to be in the UK to be covered by this law?
I can't get my head round how they think this could be implemented without insane amounts of money and a rule book like war and peace.
- cyphar 5y agoIndeed, that is one of the more practical problems with any kind of approach like this. But the general point is that even if you could hypothetically "ban encryption" it still wouldn't achieve the goals the politicians pushing this crap are claiming to want to achieve. I mean, even if you hypothetically made it impossible for computers to carry out encryption (bake into CPUs some heuristic for what encryption looks like and block it or something), folks could be taught to use ElsieFour[1] which is probably secure enough to make things about as hard as they are today. I'm sure if this hypothetical ban actually happened folks would find ways of making it easy to do ChaCha20 by hand. And as evidence that history repeats, you can always tattoo a Perl program that implements AES on your arm like some hackers in the US did in the 90s. [1]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/339 https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/339
- userbinator 5y ago...and then there's also steganography, in which every piece of communication can actually be interpreted in an entirely different way.