5 ms·
That's actually not true. It can do nothing about M of N cryptography. (That's when a key is broken up such that there are N parts, and at least M (less than
by dmayle 3y ago
That's actually not true. It can do nothing about M of N cryptography. (That's when a key is broken up such that there are N parts, and at least M (less than N) are required to decrypt. It doesn't matter how many rubber hoses you have, one person can fully divulge or give access to their key and it's still safe.
- jacquesm 3y agoSure, so you hit all of the people that have all of the pieces. Problem solved.
- saalweachter 3y agoOr you publicly announce you're hitting 1 of the N people with the rubber hose until M-1 of the other people send you their key fragments. It's not like these keys are shared among disinterested strangers who have no attachment to each other.
- worthless-trash 3y agoSomehow, somewhere you've just influenced a megacorp's internal crypto process.
- kyleplum 3y agoThat situation just requires a longer hose
- gabereiser 3y agoand more beatings.
- snoman 3y agoOr M hoses.
- hn_version_0023 3y agoI always giggle a little when really smart people forget thugs exist and do what they’re told. If that includes breaking the knees of M people to get what they’re after, then M pairs of knees are gonna get destroyed. This isn’t hard to understand, but it’s easy to forget our civilization hangs by a thread more often than any of us care to admit.
- Randomizer42 3y agoThat’s hyperbole
- MichaelZuo 3y agoAny organization that is really really serious about security will obviously keep at least N-M +1 folks, along with their family, in other countries. Which is a much much higher bar to clear for any would be rubber hose attackers.
- solardev 3y agoYour secrets aren't really safe unless Xi and Putin each have part of your key personally memorized.
- __alexs 3y agoI think you can probably get away with only breaking one pair of knees and sending a video of it to the other people.
- solardev 3y agoYoutube would delist that before they could all see it though.
- sofixa 3y agoYou know there are other ways to have a video and send it to people than YouTube, right? You can just email a link from dropbox or gdrive, or an attachment, or send a WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. message, send a letter with a USB drive, etc.
- pixl97 3y agoLets say for example Bob, Jon, and Tom have pieces of the key. Bob and Jon are in the US and arrested over and commanded by a court to give up the key. Tom is the holdout. The US will issue an international arrest warrant, and now Tom can never safely fly again or the plane will be diverted to the nearest US friendly airport where they will be extradited. So, yea, "safe" is very situational here.
- BurningFrog 3y agoDoesn't Tom's key fragment have to be on a disk somewhere for things to work? That's the actual weak link to attack.
- LinuxBender 3y agoThis probably works if each person has a cyanide+happy drug pill or a grenade and is willing to sacrifice themselves and the rubber-hoser(s). I think that requires a rare level of devotion. This process must also disable a simple and fragile signalling device to let the others know what's coming.