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You’re making the original point - you can have encryption that can include the NSA, but it would also end up including other spies too, as secrets tend to leak

You’re making the original point - you can have encryption that can include the NSA, but it would also end up including other spies too, as secrets tend to leak the more important and widely used they are. The original point was not that you can’t have a secure leak, but that the secure leak ultimately wouldn’t stay secure forever. You don’t want to build the weapons your enemies end up using against you, and in digital ecosystems it’s often trivial to do this.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
That is a political argument though, not a mathematical one. And a technical counterargument would be that even computer science is used to solutions that aren't perfect, but whose likelihood of failure is a function of effort, so they become practically usable once you push the likelihood of failure to the region around "would take more than age of observable universe", etc. Examples include: efficient primality tests, UUIDs, asymmetric cryptography itself.
treis 3y ago
AFAIK, Apple and Google have never lost a private encryption key. I see no real reason to think that won't continue forever. And ultimately keeping private keys secure is extremely easy compared to securing an OS, the app store ecosystem, and messaging app. Finding a zero day there and exfiltrating messages from a phone seems far more likely than a key being lost. We see zero days all the time and the number of lost private keys is something close to 0. If you trust them with the entire chain adding a key to decrypt messages is not a meaningful additional risk. This is about selling phones and not some moral stand by Apple. They're perfectly happy handing over data to the Chinese government. E2E encryption is denying access to the West with a legal system that provides (somewhat theoretical) legal protection while continuing to hand it over to an autocratic government that has legit concentration camps. E2E encryption is not a meaningful increase in security and it denies society the legitimate tools it needs to enforce laws. The practical effect is that criminals get away with a lot more crime while legitimate usage is not any safer.
- lstamour 3y ago
  Even if the system behaved like PRISM such that chat apps and network operators used the client-side apps to scan for keywords on specific accounts and reported back, similar to how child porn filters might work today, which would be an end-run around e2e encryption but not require transmission of every message, the risk is that the system itself might end up in a compromised state where any nation could request records of any device and suggest that national security is the reason. And that assumes the system is designed securely using asymmetric encryption and unleaked keys, there’s still data storage on the other end to worry about. I get it though, it’s possible to dive down a rabbit hole where you continuously think up technological ways that this could happen securely and prevent attack vectors as they come up. The point I’m trying to make is that it is indeed a political problem to prevent technology from being abused. Making zero exceptions is still more technologically and politically secure than making even one exception for trusted government use unless you trust every government.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

That is a political argument though, not a mathematical one. And a technical counterargument would be that even computer science is used to solutions that aren't perfect, but whose likelihood of failure is a function of effort, so they become practically usable once you push the likelihood of failure to the region around "would take more than age of observable universe", etc. Examples include: efficient primality tests, UUIDs, asymmetric cryptography itself.

treis 3y ago

AFAIK, Apple and Google have never lost a private encryption key. I see no real reason to think that won't continue forever. And ultimately keeping private keys secure is extremely easy compared to securing an OS, the app store ecosystem, and messaging app. Finding a zero day there and exfiltrating messages from a phone seems far more likely than a key being lost. We see zero days all the time and the number of lost private keys is something close to 0. If you trust them with the entire chain adding a key to decrypt messages is not a meaningful additional risk. This is about selling phones and not some moral stand by Apple. They're perfectly happy handing over data to the Chinese government. E2E encryption is denying access to the West with a legal system that provides (somewhat theoretical) legal protection while continuing to hand it over to an autocratic government that has legit concentration camps. E2E encryption is not a meaningful increase in security and it denies society the legitimate tools it needs to enforce laws. The practical effect is that criminals get away with a lot more crime while legitimate usage is not any safer.

lstamour 3y ago
Even if the system behaved like PRISM such that chat apps and network operators used the client-side apps to scan for keywords on specific accounts and reported back, similar to how child porn filters might work today, which would be an end-run around e2e encryption but not require transmission of every message, the risk is that the system itself might end up in a compromised state where any nation could request records of any device and suggest that national security is the reason. And that assumes the system is designed securely using asymmetric encryption and unleaked keys, there’s still data storage on the other end to worry about. I get it though, it’s possible to dive down a rabbit hole where you continuously think up technological ways that this could happen securely and prevent attack vectors as they come up. The point I’m trying to make is that it is indeed a political problem to prevent technology from being abused. Making zero exceptions is still more technologically and politically secure than making even one exception for trusted government use unless you trust every government.