10 ms·

UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

326 points by mikece 4y ago

canbus 4y ago
shouldn't it be "UK threatens end to end-to-end encryption"? :-D
- LeonB 4y ago
  Reminds me of this famous sentence from puzzles/logic legend Martin Gardner: “Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?”
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Metalanguages examples like this are the 'ELI5' example to Gödel's incompleteness theorem
  - lnxg33k1 4y ago
    "What is this? The requirements were so clear and even written down!"
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    ChatGPT nailed that one
    - LeonB 4y ago
      Hmmm, I’m not sure what you mean? I thought — maybe you think ChatGPT wrote the comment. But then I thought - maybe you think I used ChatGPT to recall the Martin Gardner quote. Then I was interested to see if ChatGPT would get it right… it failed badly! I asked it for the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips… here’s the response I got: “Yes, I am familiar with the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips. The quote is: "I am convinced that the best food in the world is prepared by English cooks, and served in English restaurants. The best example of this is fish and chips, which is nutritious, cheap, and tasty. The fish is delicate, the batter crisp, the chips are golden, and the mushy peas are the perfect accompaniment." Martin Gardner was an American writer who is best known for his work in mathematics and science, as well as his long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. However, he also wrote about a wide range of topics, including literature, philosophy, and popular culture, and was known for his wit and humor.” Nice try chatto, nice try.
      - LeonB 4y ago
        Ah wait — I realised what you meant. I pasted the quote into ChatGPT and it understood Martin perfectly — The reply was “Yes, adding quotation marks to the sentence would definitely make it clearer and easier to read. Here's how the sentence would look with quotation marks: "I want to put a hyphen between the words 'Fish' and 'And', and 'And' and 'Chips' in my 'Fish-and-Chips' sign." By using quotation marks, it becomes clear which words the hyphens should go between, and it also clarifies the intended meaning of the phrase "Fish-and-Chips." Without quotation marks, the sentence can be confusing and difficult to understand.”
- nicwest 4y ago
  then when they back down we could have "UK threats to end end-to-end encryption end"
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    UK to end ending end-to-end encryption.
  - canbus 4y ago
    unlikely to happen, I haven't seen this government U-turn on anything yet!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  To what end?
xyzzy4747 4y ago
Ending encryption is like ending math. It's not possible and just moves the developers more into the underground. It could likely cause regulatory arbitrage situations too (e.g. developers create apps for other countries but determined people in the U.K. find a way to access them).
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I don’t like this argument because it makes the subject in question overly abstract in a way that would not apply in other situations. Examples: “How dare you make me become a licensed engineer just to be paid to do math?” “How dare you arrest me for this child porn? It’s just a sequence of 1s and 0s, therefore, you are criminalizing a number!”
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So should we be more concerned more about how these 1 and 0 are produced (no one harmed, everything legal) rather than what is distributed using these 1 and 0.
    - Nebasuke 4y ago
      You would assume wrong in the case of the UK. "Extreme pornography" is already illegal, even when staged, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Justice_and_Immigration_Act_2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Jus....
      - vincnetas 4y ago
        It's curious how it's ok to depict a human being sadistically cut to pieces while he is in terrible agony as long as there is no sexual arousal involved.
dghf 4y ago
I'm sure we had legislative threats to encryption under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between. I'm uncertain whether to be relieved (because multiple previous attempts have come to naught) or worried (because they might actually do it this time).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between. There was exactly one Prime Minister between Blair and Cameron, and he (Brown) wasn't elected.
  - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
    Brown was elected. He was elected as MP by his constituents, and selected as PM by the Queen, just like every other PM. Or, essentially, he was elected by the House, which is the electorate for the PM, but instead of actually holding a vote, the Queen just assumed what the result would be, which is how the UK always does it. (Ireland actually holds the vote for Taoiseach, and every party solemnly puts forward their own candidate, and makes speeches on their behalf, despite the fact that everyone knows what the result would be. It's a piece of political theatre.)
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      You're right; we don't elect PMs. And it's true that Brown was elected as an MP by his constituents; and I was elected chair by my local resident's association. So what? I still think a PM that doesn't lead their party into an election lacks legitimacy, and isn't a 'proper' PM. The most recent two - Sunak and Truss - weren't elected in that sense, because they didn't have any popular mandate. We don't elect the party of government either, though; few people can name their MP. They vote based on party leaders, as long as voting is permitted. The idea that the PM is "elected by the House" is nonsense. No such election occurs. Being "selected as PM" by the monarch doesn't count at all. It's completely irrelevant (I'm a republican). The monarch appoints anyone that can "command the support of the House", which invariably means the leader of the majority party. But in the absence of a General Election, the appointee cannot claim a popular mandate, and shouldn't do anything that would "surprise" people. Truss, outrageously, claimed to have a popular mandate, relying on the mandate that Johnson won. But he won his mandate more-or-less exclusively on the Brexit thing.
derelicta 4y ago
The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Everything is coordinated at some level. The DMCA began as an attempt to meet our “international obligations.”
- seanhunter 4y ago
  The intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have collaborated extensively since WWII (this is the so called "Five Eyes"[1]) and of course the NATO powers coordinate defense as well as part of that organization. Edit to add: I mention the five eyes because cryptography (and cybersecurity) tend to fall into the purview of the signals intelligence agencies in government, so that would be NSA in the US, GCHQ in the UK etc. They collaborate under this arrangement. [1] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-five-eyes-the-intelligence-alliance-of-the-anglosphere/ https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-five-eyes-the-intelligen...
  - moremetadata 4y ago
    [dead]
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  The fact that we regard as "democratic" (because they are good guys, or so we'd wish) a country with king and lords (even a House of Lords, or even "Lords Spiritual" [1]), is the greater joke. [1] Just a random click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_House_of_Lords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_House_o... on the Bishop of Chichester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Chichester#List_of_bishops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Chichester#List_of_b... reveals a list of bishops going back as far as 681, the year 681. Particularly funny is how the majority of the bishops seem to have "died in office". To call a land with 1,300+ years of hegemony "democratic" is beyond satire.
seanhunter 4y ago
The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1]. Diffie just started by explaining that cybersecurity is all about securing some asset from threats such that the cost of attack was too great given the value of the asset. How do you protect the store that has all the cryptographic keys in the entire United Kingdom? It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. Government dude was totally out of his depth and the bill was eventually dropped. [1] Turing award winner and the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman. Fair to say he's a guy who knows a thing or two about cryptography.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Ironic considering we have things now like gmail, and god knows how many services you could get access to via password resets if you could get access to all the emails. Or CI systems for another example
- timthorn 4y ago
  That was perhaps just the UK response to the Clipper Chip.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased. These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and they have been instead been given some generic independent sounding job title. I'm not joking! BBC Radio 4 famously recently did a "Brexit anniversary programme". Three people in the studio, the presenter and two guests. The two guests were .... Theresa Villiers and Daniel Hannan, two hardcore Brexteers who, of course, spent the entire interview session fighting completely unchallenged over who could give the most sycophantic sunlit-uplands view of Brexit.
grapesurgeon 4y ago
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dspillett 4y ago
A paraphrase of the age-old glib phrase is in order: If you outlaw End-to-End Encryption, only criminals will have End-to-End Encryption. It should also be pointed out to them that saying “you there, yes you, stop doing that” to remote, likely anonymous, criminal types, has never been effective.
- dexterdog 4y ago
  It should be "If you outlaw End-to-End Encryption, only outlaws will have End-to-End Encryption."
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Yep, my brain juddered and switched tracks between criminalise/criminals and outlaw/outlaws halfway through the sentence.
- philipwhiuk 4y ago
  I guess it's easier to arrest people for encrypting stuff than proving they are dealing drugs.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  It's also worth pointing out that if you practise enough and with a little spare time you can do an dh key exchange with pen and paper. I look forward to the day when I am arrested for mathing too hard with random people in my neighbourhood (jk, there's not enough cops to arrest anyone anymore).
- wmf 4y ago
  In practice if you offer criminals a choice of real encryption (Signal) or fake encryption (Sky ECC, Anom, etc.) they choose the fake encryption.
mordae 4y ago
At this point, why not take a stand and tell the governments across the world that e2e encryption is here to stay? Signed by most of the tech community and the employers, with a threat to collectively retaliate and blackhole the entire country. Or something along those lines.
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
So, what's going to happen with secure banking? Will local govt officials (councillors) get to spy on all my credit card transactions and sneak a peak at my account passwords and PINs? This will basically make e-commerce a risky business. If I buy something from overseas, will I then get in trouble for setting up an end-to-end encrypted link with their shop or is it more likely that international sites will just stop serving UK customers so that they don't have to comply with an unworkable law?
- dannyw 4y ago
  All credit card transactions and financial transactions are basically open book.
  - josefx 4y ago
    And how do you sign the transactions to confirm that they where send by someone authorized?
- beardyw 4y ago
  End-to-end implies traffic between individuals. So for instance WhatsApp can't read your messages but the end recipient can. That said, my bank did try to reassure me they had end-to-end encryption for my web access. It's not the same thing.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    > End-to-end implies traffic between individuals That's certainly one interpretation, but I'd counter that an HTTPS connection to an online shop is also end-to-end as the contents are encrypted such that any intermediate ISP cannot sniff the contents, but only myself and the online shop are able to.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      That's not what cryptographers or even most people dealing with messengers would consider end-to-end encryption.
gumballindie 4y ago
What happens if we sniff all internet traffic and train an ML model? Can we automate all input and output to build a fully automated internet?
- becquerel 4y ago
  some say this has already happened
  - toxicFork 4y ago
    It's called the big bang
wiredfool 4y ago
If they end end to end encryption, then Signal and Telegram can read the private messages that the leaders inevitably use to get around records retention laws.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  While it's technically possible to use Telegram safely, I wouldn't put it in the same category as Signal. Even WhatsApp has a better underlying cryptographic system.
afavour 4y ago
Where others see conspiracy I see incompetence (wish a dash of conspiracy). Time and time again it’s shown that our elected officials have no clue what they’re doing with tech. They simply do not understand the issues at hand in an era when tech is taking over more and more of our lives. I’d say we should elect more people with tech knowledge but who’s going to quit their lucrative software engineering job to run for office, get paid considerably less and achieve little?
- r00fus 4y ago
  At some point, there is no point in distinguishing the two. Does it matter that Boris was a real-life clown or that Labour (or LibDems for that matter) were so high on their own farts as to not be able to make a reasonable challenge when given the opportunity (see 2010 election)? No, there is not. I subscribe to Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" If they can't be bothered to actually learn about the tech, perhaps it's because their funders don't want to.
Arathorn 4y ago
I was very glad to find Lord Kamall saying sensible things about this last week in the context of the House of Lords debate - at least one person there is following the tech argument: https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/online-safety-bill-risks-making-apps-vulnerable-attacks-bad-actors https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/online-safety-...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Y_Y 4y ago
UK to end end-to end? To what end?
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Bell.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
To ban end-to-end encryption you effectively need to ban math. Even if all messaging apps will remove built-in encryption function you can still use e2ee in your keyboard app or something that would seamlessly decrypt incoming messages and encrypt outgoing messages on the fly.
- night-rider 4y ago
  Or they could license strong cryptography to organizations that need it like banks & fintech. The 'banning' part means the ordinary citizenry can't use it except for online banking.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Key escrow and other three-way encryption algorithms exist. You wouldn't want to use them in any normal circumstances, but there's no technical reason why you couldn't. A key for you, your recipient, and your friendly government agent. Very few people actually write cryptographic code, and even fewer write code that is safe to use. I doubt many people will bother with some kind of messenger hook/overlay keyboard to supplant the native messenger encryption. After all, in some countries SMS/MMS is still in use and nobody seems to care about encryption there.
  - jonathanstrange 4y ago
    That depends on how easy to use you make this kind of software. An app that makes the soft keyboard produce encrypted output on the fly could indeed become a popular solution until it's prohibited. Like always, the problem is key exchange, though.
- Retr0id 4y ago
  They can't stop people from doing math, but they can stop people from sharing high-entropy (i.e. "looks encrypted") data. There are of course workarounds (e.g. steganography), but if you add enough friction then the average person won't bother, and those who do try to maintain their privacy will be at even greater risk of detection and punishment.
- 4y ago
rennsport_eth 4y ago
CCTV on every block, ofc they will try and threaten end-to-end encryption. CBDCs on the way as well…
nuklx 4y ago
In practice, this probably just means that WhatsApp, Signal etc. have to implement a lawful intercept capability, whereby a targeted user can have their communications read but everyone else continues as normal. Doesn't seem like such a big deal, considering this would be done by court order and limited to users suspected of engaging in criminal activity.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  What if the user is not/ has never lived in the country with the court order?
- regularjack 4y ago
  This requires the system to have a back door. Choose one: secure (i.e. encrypted) or has-back-door. It's not possible to have both. If authorities want to read the messages of someone, they need to lawfully get access to their device and read the messages.
squishy47 4y ago
the title is somewhat misleading; the Gov hasn't said this exactly, this is just very likely outcome of this bill. the bill says that platforms that host user generated content would be required to up the moderation game and to feed the content (messages) into a home-office built/approved system for monitoring. (not sure if all content goes through HO or if it's just messages). no one is banning maths or secure banking just e2ee for comms. It also mentioned that people within the user generated content company would be held criminally liable for breaches of this law, spefically content moderation. completely defeats the point of being a company. the whole thing is a fucking joke and should be scrapped, just thought I'd clarify some points
danw1979 4y ago
This will not happen. If the government (or Ofcom if the bill goes through) is seen by the populace to be the cause of WhatsApp being withdrawn from British users the outrage will be deafening. No administration would do such a thing, even the incompetents in office at the moment. (quite possible is a terrible PR own goal followed by a u-turn, however)
maccam912 4y ago
Unrelated, I just wanted to get it on record somewhere that I sometimes like to send myself random strings of characters and/or bytes. Sometimes to friends and family too. Sometimes they think its so funny they send back random strings as well. Its a thing we do, so I'm glad this law is not going to stop us from sending plaintext random strings to each other.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  Oi! You got a loicence for them random strings??
AniseAbyss 4y ago
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JEDI-HACKER 4y ago
[dead]

326 points by mikece 4y ago

canbus 4y ago

shouldn't it be "UK threatens end to end-to-end encryption"? :-D

LeonB 4y ago
Reminds me of this famous sentence from puzzles/logic legend Martin Gardner: “Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?”
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Metalanguages examples like this are the 'ELI5' example to Gödel's incompleteness theorem
- lnxg33k1 4y ago
  "What is this? The requirements were so clear and even written down!"
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  ChatGPT nailed that one
  - LeonB 4y ago
    Hmmm, I’m not sure what you mean? I thought — maybe you think ChatGPT wrote the comment. But then I thought - maybe you think I used ChatGPT to recall the Martin Gardner quote. Then I was interested to see if ChatGPT would get it right… it failed badly! I asked it for the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips… here’s the response I got: “Yes, I am familiar with the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips. The quote is: "I am convinced that the best food in the world is prepared by English cooks, and served in English restaurants. The best example of this is fish and chips, which is nutritious, cheap, and tasty. The fish is delicate, the batter crisp, the chips are golden, and the mushy peas are the perfect accompaniment." Martin Gardner was an American writer who is best known for his work in mathematics and science, as well as his long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. However, he also wrote about a wide range of topics, including literature, philosophy, and popular culture, and was known for his wit and humor.” Nice try chatto, nice try.
    - LeonB 4y ago
      Ah wait — I realised what you meant. I pasted the quote into ChatGPT and it understood Martin perfectly — The reply was “Yes, adding quotation marks to the sentence would definitely make it clearer and easier to read. Here's how the sentence would look with quotation marks: "I want to put a hyphen between the words 'Fish' and 'And', and 'And' and 'Chips' in my 'Fish-and-Chips' sign." By using quotation marks, it becomes clear which words the hyphens should go between, and it also clarifies the intended meaning of the phrase "Fish-and-Chips." Without quotation marks, the sentence can be confusing and difficult to understand.”
nicwest 4y ago
then when they back down we could have "UK threats to end end-to-end encryption end"
- gpderetta 4y ago
  UK to end ending end-to-end encryption.
- canbus 4y ago
  unlikely to happen, I haven't seen this government U-turn on anything yet!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thomastjeffery 4y ago
To what end?

xyzzy4747 4y ago

Ending encryption is like ending math. It's not possible and just moves the developers more into the underground. It could likely cause regulatory arbitrage situations too (e.g. developers create apps for other countries but determined people in the U.K. find a way to access them).

gjsman-1000 4y ago
I don’t like this argument because it makes the subject in question overly abstract in a way that would not apply in other situations. Examples: “How dare you make me become a licensed engineer just to be paid to do math?” “How dare you arrest me for this child porn? It’s just a sequence of 1s and 0s, therefore, you are criminalizing a number!”
- vincnetas 4y ago
  Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So should we be more concerned more about how these 1 and 0 are produced (no one harmed, everything legal) rather than what is distributed using these 1 and 0.
  - Nebasuke 4y ago
    You would assume wrong in the case of the UK. "Extreme pornography" is already illegal, even when staged, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Justice_and_Immigration_Act_2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Jus....
    - vincnetas 4y ago
      It's curious how it's ok to depict a human being sadistically cut to pieces while he is in terrible agony as long as there is no sexual arousal involved.

dghf 4y ago

I'm sure we had legislative threats to encryption under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between. I'm uncertain whether to be relieved (because multiple previous attempts have come to naught) or worried (because they might actually do it this time).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
denton-scratch 4y ago
> under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between. There was exactly one Prime Minister between Blair and Cameron, and he (Brown) wasn't elected.
- TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
  Brown was elected. He was elected as MP by his constituents, and selected as PM by the Queen, just like every other PM. Or, essentially, he was elected by the House, which is the electorate for the PM, but instead of actually holding a vote, the Queen just assumed what the result would be, which is how the UK always does it. (Ireland actually holds the vote for Taoiseach, and every party solemnly puts forward their own candidate, and makes speeches on their behalf, despite the fact that everyone knows what the result would be. It's a piece of political theatre.)
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    You're right; we don't elect PMs. And it's true that Brown was elected as an MP by his constituents; and I was elected chair by my local resident's association. So what? I still think a PM that doesn't lead their party into an election lacks legitimacy, and isn't a 'proper' PM. The most recent two - Sunak and Truss - weren't elected in that sense, because they didn't have any popular mandate. We don't elect the party of government either, though; few people can name their MP. They vote based on party leaders, as long as voting is permitted. The idea that the PM is "elected by the House" is nonsense. No such election occurs. Being "selected as PM" by the monarch doesn't count at all. It's completely irrelevant (I'm a republican). The monarch appoints anyone that can "command the support of the House", which invariably means the leader of the majority party. But in the absence of a General Election, the appointee cannot claim a popular mandate, and shouldn't do anything that would "surprise" people. Truss, outrageously, claimed to have a popular mandate, relying on the mandate that Johnson won. But he won his mandate more-or-less exclusively on the Brexit thing.

derelicta 4y ago

The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Everything is coordinated at some level. The DMCA began as an attempt to meet our “international obligations.”
seanhunter 4y ago
The intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have collaborated extensively since WWII (this is the so called "Five Eyes"[1]) and of course the NATO powers coordinate defense as well as part of that organization. Edit to add: I mention the five eyes because cryptography (and cybersecurity) tend to fall into the purview of the signals intelligence agencies in government, so that would be NSA in the US, GCHQ in the UK etc. They collaborate under this arrangement. [1] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-five-eyes-the-intelligence-alliance-of-the-anglosphere/ https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-five-eyes-the-intelligen...
- moremetadata 4y ago
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ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
The fact that we regard as "democratic" (because they are good guys, or so we'd wish) a country with king and lords (even a House of Lords, or even "Lords Spiritual" [1]), is the greater joke. [1] Just a random click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_House_of_Lords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_House_o... on the Bishop of Chichester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Chichester#List_of_bishops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Chichester#List_of_b... reveals a list of bishops going back as far as 681, the year 681. Particularly funny is how the majority of the bishops seem to have "died in office". To call a land with 1,300+ years of hegemony "democratic" is beyond satire.

seanhunter 4y ago

The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1]. Diffie just started by explaining that cybersecurity is all about securing some asset from threats such that the cost of attack was too great given the value of the asset. How do you protect the store that has all the cryptographic keys in the entire United Kingdom? It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. Government dude was totally out of his depth and the bill was eventually dropped. [1] Turing award winner and the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman. Fair to say he's a guy who knows a thing or two about cryptography.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Ironic considering we have things now like gmail, and god knows how many services you could get access to via password resets if you could get access to all the emails. Or CI systems for another example
timthorn 4y ago
That was perhaps just the UK response to the Clipper Chip.
traceroute66 4y ago
> UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased. These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and they have been instead been given some generic independent sounding job title. I'm not joking! BBC Radio 4 famously recently did a "Brexit anniversary programme". Three people in the studio, the presenter and two guests. The two guests were .... Theresa Villiers and Daniel Hannan, two hardcore Brexteers who, of course, spent the entire interview session fighting completely unchallenged over who could give the most sycophantic sunlit-uplands view of Brexit.

grapesurgeon 4y ago

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dspillett 4y ago

A paraphrase of the age-old glib phrase is in order: If you outlaw End-to-End Encryption, only criminals will have End-to-End Encryption. It should also be pointed out to them that saying “you there, yes you, stop doing that” to remote, likely anonymous, criminal types, has never been effective.

dexterdog 4y ago
It should be "If you outlaw End-to-End Encryption, only outlaws will have End-to-End Encryption."
- dspillett 4y ago
  Yep, my brain juddered and switched tracks between criminalise/criminals and outlaw/outlaws halfway through the sentence.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
I guess it's easier to arrest people for encrypting stuff than proving they are dealing drugs.
antibasilisk 4y ago
It's also worth pointing out that if you practise enough and with a little spare time you can do an dh key exchange with pen and paper. I look forward to the day when I am arrested for mathing too hard with random people in my neighbourhood (jk, there's not enough cops to arrest anyone anymore).
wmf 4y ago
In practice if you offer criminals a choice of real encryption (Signal) or fake encryption (Sky ECC, Anom, etc.) they choose the fake encryption.

mordae 4y ago

At this point, why not take a stand and tell the governments across the world that e2e encryption is here to stay? Signed by most of the tech community and the employers, with a threat to collectively retaliate and blackhole the entire country. Or something along those lines.

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

So, what's going to happen with secure banking? Will local govt officials (councillors) get to spy on all my credit card transactions and sneak a peak at my account passwords and PINs? This will basically make e-commerce a risky business. If I buy something from overseas, will I then get in trouble for setting up an end-to-end encrypted link with their shop or is it more likely that international sites will just stop serving UK customers so that they don't have to comply with an unworkable law?

dannyw 4y ago
All credit card transactions and financial transactions are basically open book.
- josefx 4y ago
  And how do you sign the transactions to confirm that they where send by someone authorized?
beardyw 4y ago
End-to-end implies traffic between individuals. So for instance WhatsApp can't read your messages but the end recipient can. That said, my bank did try to reassure me they had end-to-end encryption for my web access. It's not the same thing.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  > End-to-end implies traffic between individuals That's certainly one interpretation, but I'd counter that an HTTPS connection to an online shop is also end-to-end as the contents are encrypted such that any intermediate ISP cannot sniff the contents, but only myself and the online shop are able to.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    That's not what cryptographers or even most people dealing with messengers would consider end-to-end encryption.

gumballindie 4y ago

What happens if we sniff all internet traffic and train an ML model? Can we automate all input and output to build a fully automated internet?

becquerel 4y ago
some say this has already happened
- toxicFork 4y ago
  It's called the big bang

wiredfool 4y ago

If they end end to end encryption, then Signal and Telegram can read the private messages that the leaders inevitably use to get around records retention laws.

jeroenhd 4y ago
While it's technically possible to use Telegram safely, I wouldn't put it in the same category as Signal. Even WhatsApp has a better underlying cryptographic system.

afavour 4y ago

Where others see conspiracy I see incompetence (wish a dash of conspiracy). Time and time again it’s shown that our elected officials have no clue what they’re doing with tech. They simply do not understand the issues at hand in an era when tech is taking over more and more of our lives. I’d say we should elect more people with tech knowledge but who’s going to quit their lucrative software engineering job to run for office, get paid considerably less and achieve little?

r00fus 4y ago
At some point, there is no point in distinguishing the two. Does it matter that Boris was a real-life clown or that Labour (or LibDems for that matter) were so high on their own farts as to not be able to make a reasonable challenge when given the opportunity (see 2010 election)? No, there is not. I subscribe to Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" If they can't be bothered to actually learn about the tech, perhaps it's because their funders don't want to.

Arathorn 4y ago

I was very glad to find Lord Kamall saying sensible things about this last week in the context of the House of Lords debate - at least one person there is following the tech argument: https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/online-safety-bill-risks-making-apps-vulnerable-attacks-bad-actors https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/online-safety-...

deleted 4y ago

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Y_Y 4y ago

UK to end end-to end? To what end?

InCityDreams 4y ago
Bell.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

To ban end-to-end encryption you effectively need to ban math. Even if all messaging apps will remove built-in encryption function you can still use e2ee in your keyboard app or something that would seamlessly decrypt incoming messages and encrypt outgoing messages on the fly.

night-rider 4y ago
Or they could license strong cryptography to organizations that need it like banks & fintech. The 'banning' part means the ordinary citizenry can't use it except for online banking.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Key escrow and other three-way encryption algorithms exist. You wouldn't want to use them in any normal circumstances, but there's no technical reason why you couldn't. A key for you, your recipient, and your friendly government agent. Very few people actually write cryptographic code, and even fewer write code that is safe to use. I doubt many people will bother with some kind of messenger hook/overlay keyboard to supplant the native messenger encryption. After all, in some countries SMS/MMS is still in use and nobody seems to care about encryption there.
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  That depends on how easy to use you make this kind of software. An app that makes the soft keyboard produce encrypted output on the fly could indeed become a popular solution until it's prohibited. Like always, the problem is key exchange, though.
Retr0id 4y ago
They can't stop people from doing math, but they can stop people from sharing high-entropy (i.e. "looks encrypted") data. There are of course workarounds (e.g. steganography), but if you add enough friction then the average person won't bother, and those who do try to maintain their privacy will be at even greater risk of detection and punishment.
4y ago

rennsport_eth 4y ago

CCTV on every block, ofc they will try and threaten end-to-end encryption. CBDCs on the way as well…

nuklx 4y ago

In practice, this probably just means that WhatsApp, Signal etc. have to implement a lawful intercept capability, whereby a targeted user can have their communications read but everyone else continues as normal. Doesn't seem like such a big deal, considering this would be done by court order and limited to users suspected of engaging in criminal activity.

InCityDreams 4y ago
What if the user is not/ has never lived in the country with the court order?
regularjack 4y ago
This requires the system to have a back door. Choose one: secure (i.e. encrypted) or has-back-door. It's not possible to have both. If authorities want to read the messages of someone, they need to lawfully get access to their device and read the messages.

squishy47 4y ago

the title is somewhat misleading; the Gov hasn't said this exactly, this is just very likely outcome of this bill. the bill says that platforms that host user generated content would be required to up the moderation game and to feed the content (messages) into a home-office built/approved system for monitoring. (not sure if all content goes through HO or if it's just messages). no one is banning maths or secure banking just e2ee for comms. It also mentioned that people within the user generated content company would be held criminally liable for breaches of this law, spefically content moderation. completely defeats the point of being a company. the whole thing is a fucking joke and should be scrapped, just thought I'd clarify some points

danw1979 4y ago

This will not happen. If the government (or Ofcom if the bill goes through) is seen by the populace to be the cause of WhatsApp being withdrawn from British users the outrage will be deafening. No administration would do such a thing, even the incompetents in office at the moment. (quite possible is a terrible PR own goal followed by a u-turn, however)

maccam912 4y ago

Unrelated, I just wanted to get it on record somewhere that I sometimes like to send myself random strings of characters and/or bytes. Sometimes to friends and family too. Sometimes they think its so funny they send back random strings as well. Its a thing we do, so I'm glad this law is not going to stop us from sending plaintext random strings to each other.

brokenmachine 4y ago
Oi! You got a loicence for them random strings??

AniseAbyss 4y ago

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JEDI-HACKER 4y ago

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