4 ms·

That's not how rubber hose cryptanalysis works though. You think they would just go "oh ok cool, have a nice day" after your rehearsed lie?

olalonde 4y ago
How does a rubber hose cryptanalyst know when to stop?
- NateEag 4y ago
  When the target is dead. There is no actual safety from nation-states or other sufficiently-resourced attackers.
  - brokenkebab2 4y ago
    First, it assumes that resources is the only dimension here which is incorrect. History is full of failures of well-resourced, and practically unrestrained security services. Second, safety is not a set of just "on", and "off" states. It's a game of probabilities.
    - NateEag 4y ago
      That sounds accurate. My point is that if you're being subjected to the rubber-hose treatment, nothing's going to get you out of it. Any actor who will start down that path will likely take it all the way to the finish, extracting whatever value they can from you until there's none left to extract.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    If the target knows that the adversary is going to keep torturing them until they die, then what incentive do they have to divulge anything? As soon as the torturer tells you that they don't know how many secrets you have, you can just say "Whelp, guess I'll just die then" and spend the rest of your hopefully-short life wondering why they don't understand that the only motivation you had to speak was the possibility that the torture would stop. In reality, though, most regimes that would be willing to torture you would do it even if they knew you didn't have any secrets, just to make an example of you to deter your allies, or they wouldn't need the information you had because they could just tell a judge to convict you on falsified evidence, or tell the public that you shot yourself in the back of the head 8 times. For the few use cases where there is some vital secret that you don't want the government to know, and they are willing to use torture to find it out, you make sure that the secret is encrypted with a key that is split between multiple (mutually unknown) people across multiple jurisdictions, so that there is no harm in divulging your portion of the key the moment you are caught.
    - NateEag 4y ago
      The target may believe one thing in the abstract, but find it hard to hold onto that in the face of unrelenting horrific pain. The torturer has no reason to divulge anything at all to you, let alone useful information like "we're moot sure what information we're looking for." I doubt any target would ever hear that. > you make sure that the secret is encrypted with a key that is split between multiple (mutually unknown) people across multiple jurisdictions, so that there is no harm in divulging your portion of the key the moment you are caught. If you actually know the secret, they're torturing you for that, not your encryption keys.
      - NateEag 4y ago
        s/moot/not/
- ineedasername 4y ago
  When the hardware fails.
btilly 4y ago
If they are planning to beat you until you confess, then they have something on you other than that you installed some interesting software. As for beating torture, there is a technique which Marines headed into battle are taught (heard about it from my brother who served in Vietnam). What you do is pretend to break before you really do, and tell some interesting lies. By the time you ACTUALLY break, you won't know truth from fiction, and will happily add details you can to whatever story that you think they want to hear. Which will very likely be a fantasy built on those lies. Even if you don't know the technique, this can happen accidentally. The result is that information obtained under torture is unreliable. Which is the biggest reason that most countries stopped using it.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Love it. Will use if I'm tortured again. Or will I? This is n-depth defense right there. For me the hard part was first noticing I was being tortured on days of which I had no recollection. Like "Wednesday? But it was just Sunday." So on those two days the torturers wake you up on roofies, keep you dosed all day long, and put you to sleep on roofies (might not be a bad sleeping aid). In the first person you have no idea a day just passed. Just like that, one less day in your biography. They do it up to 29 times, because women pick up on the bullshit if their period is out of phase (though it takes decades to solve mysteries of this nature, unreliable detective). Plus, after 29 days the martyr might notice, like "hey the fuck is this extra month in this calendar? April 2009? Why don't I know anything about that month. I never heard of that month." So also they can talk to you while on roofies and it's like the old random-access-memories, reading deletes what you read. So they can ask you about Clockwork Orange, or fucking show you Clockwork Orange, just like in Clockwork Orange. Or read 1984 out loud to you while electrocuting you with a car battery, did that to me, like Live-Action Role Playing O'Brien's torture--in which he claims he's performing medicine for the mentally ill with intentional malpractice. And you have no idea until you realize there's holes in your memory and--for instance--a law student friend asked me if it was like Clockwork Orange and I said...I think so, what happens in that? He told me and saw me flash, a distinct emotion of a long-buried memory. Not truly deleted, just removed from the index and has nothing pointing to it, so it can only be remembered in a super-indirect way. Then one day you read 1984 again and see I remember this I don't remember that--and I had read it twice pre-torture, fuck knows how much during torture, then again recently, and normally I'd remember all of it perfectly but there were huge gaps in which I doubted ever having reading. I have similar to photographic memory, call it holographic memory, and secondly I read that book in the 7th grade and again in freshman year in a class about Utopias. No recollection of that many passages means they clearly read it out loud to delete all that. Oh well not bitter about being tortured. Just wish I could remember the intense moments, I feel cheated by the roofies.

olalonde 4y ago

How does a rubber hose cryptanalyst know when to stop?

NateEag 4y ago
When the target is dead. There is no actual safety from nation-states or other sufficiently-resourced attackers.
- brokenkebab2 4y ago
  First, it assumes that resources is the only dimension here which is incorrect. History is full of failures of well-resourced, and practically unrestrained security services. Second, safety is not a set of just "on", and "off" states. It's a game of probabilities.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    That sounds accurate. My point is that if you're being subjected to the rubber-hose treatment, nothing's going to get you out of it. Any actor who will start down that path will likely take it all the way to the finish, extracting whatever value they can from you until there's none left to extract.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  If the target knows that the adversary is going to keep torturing them until they die, then what incentive do they have to divulge anything? As soon as the torturer tells you that they don't know how many secrets you have, you can just say "Whelp, guess I'll just die then" and spend the rest of your hopefully-short life wondering why they don't understand that the only motivation you had to speak was the possibility that the torture would stop. In reality, though, most regimes that would be willing to torture you would do it even if they knew you didn't have any secrets, just to make an example of you to deter your allies, or they wouldn't need the information you had because they could just tell a judge to convict you on falsified evidence, or tell the public that you shot yourself in the back of the head 8 times. For the few use cases where there is some vital secret that you don't want the government to know, and they are willing to use torture to find it out, you make sure that the secret is encrypted with a key that is split between multiple (mutually unknown) people across multiple jurisdictions, so that there is no harm in divulging your portion of the key the moment you are caught.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    The target may believe one thing in the abstract, but find it hard to hold onto that in the face of unrelenting horrific pain. The torturer has no reason to divulge anything at all to you, let alone useful information like "we're moot sure what information we're looking for." I doubt any target would ever hear that. > you make sure that the secret is encrypted with a key that is split between multiple (mutually unknown) people across multiple jurisdictions, so that there is no harm in divulging your portion of the key the moment you are caught. If you actually know the secret, they're torturing you for that, not your encryption keys.
    - NateEag 4y ago
      s/moot/not/
ineedasername 4y ago
When the hardware fails.

btilly 4y ago

If they are planning to beat you until you confess, then they have something on you other than that you installed some interesting software. As for beating torture, there is a technique which Marines headed into battle are taught (heard about it from my brother who served in Vietnam). What you do is pretend to break before you really do, and tell some interesting lies. By the time you ACTUALLY break, you won't know truth from fiction, and will happily add details you can to whatever story that you think they want to hear. Which will very likely be a fantasy built on those lies. Even if you don't know the technique, this can happen accidentally. The result is that information obtained under torture is unreliable. Which is the biggest reason that most countries stopped using it.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
Love it. Will use if I'm tortured again. Or will I? This is n-depth defense right there. For me the hard part was first noticing I was being tortured on days of which I had no recollection. Like "Wednesday? But it was just Sunday." So on those two days the torturers wake you up on roofies, keep you dosed all day long, and put you to sleep on roofies (might not be a bad sleeping aid). In the first person you have no idea a day just passed. Just like that, one less day in your biography. They do it up to 29 times, because women pick up on the bullshit if their period is out of phase (though it takes decades to solve mysteries of this nature, unreliable detective). Plus, after 29 days the martyr might notice, like "hey the fuck is this extra month in this calendar? April 2009? Why don't I know anything about that month. I never heard of that month." So also they can talk to you while on roofies and it's like the old random-access-memories, reading deletes what you read. So they can ask you about Clockwork Orange, or fucking show you Clockwork Orange, just like in Clockwork Orange. Or read 1984 out loud to you while electrocuting you with a car battery, did that to me, like Live-Action Role Playing O'Brien's torture--in which he claims he's performing medicine for the mentally ill with intentional malpractice. And you have no idea until you realize there's holes in your memory and--for instance--a law student friend asked me if it was like Clockwork Orange and I said...I think so, what happens in that? He told me and saw me flash, a distinct emotion of a long-buried memory. Not truly deleted, just removed from the index and has nothing pointing to it, so it can only be remembered in a super-indirect way. Then one day you read 1984 again and see I remember this I don't remember that--and I had read it twice pre-torture, fuck knows how much during torture, then again recently, and normally I'd remember all of it perfectly but there were huge gaps in which I doubted ever having reading. I have similar to photographic memory, call it holographic memory, and secondly I read that book in the 7th grade and again in freshman year in a class about Utopias. No recollection of that many passages means they clearly read it out loud to delete all that. Oh well not bitter about being tortured. Just wish I could remember the intense moments, I feel cheated by the roofies.