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"the fundamental reality of encryption (...) is that the person who is using encryption (...) cannot read it either unless the key is put in some point. (...) E
by gluczywo 12y ago
"the fundamental reality of encryption (...) is that
the person who is using encryption (...) cannot read it either unless the key is put in some point. (...)
Even when your phone is encrypted locally, when you are looking at the secret picture, if the picture is visible to you it's because that picture is decrypted. (...)
What this means is that even heavily encrypted communication is vulnerable to traditional means of investigation."
I'm a strong believer in crypto as the liberating technology, but this quote is a wonderful Devil's Advocate argument that dispels hackers crypto dreams.
- oska 12y ago> a wonderful Devil's Advocate argument that dispels hackers crypto dreams I think most hackers understand this. Turned around, it's the basic argument against DRM - that for the 'consumer' to access the content it must be unlocked.
- bobbles 12y agoYeah the most restrictive form of DRM in the world means nothing if I can just record a video of it / transcribe it
- Tloewald 12y agoWell it involves a generation loss
- jacquesm 12y agoUntil recently that was the norm and usually the information survives such copying for several generations before it becomes unusable.
- vidarh 12y agoAnd furthermore, most content businesses is facing a reality where they are having a hard time getting users to pay more for higher quality versions, yet the higher quality versions exists. If users have to settle for "only" DVD quality rips of content ripped from Bluray, for example, most wouldn't care. That problem is going to make DRM increasingly pointless with pushes for 4K and beyond.
- smtddr 12y agoThis has always been acknowledged by the hacker community as the Analog hole: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
- brianpgordon 12y agoAlso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
- gluczywo 12y agoIt's good to see the concept was named. Having a name for idea empowers. While the hypothetical defense (in the privacy protection context, not DRM) to close the Analog Hole would be to train human brain to make it consume encrypted stream and decrypt inside the skull, I'm disappointed to see that the trend is reverse. It's a pity that the above term is not brought about when discussing keepass/lastpass kind of tools that IMO do a disservice to personal security. They perversely expose your entire secret space to be vulnerable to Analog Hole. I know it sounds like dangerously off topic but I feel that the "Snowden case" begs the call for action. Snowden's response on "how to defend yourself" in June 2013 was: strong cryptography. Today his stance is less optimistic since encryption is never really end-to-end. That's why secret management seems to be the paramount issue of individual protection against totalitarian state. Convenience-over-security services don't make a good job here.
- aptwebapps 12y agoYou may be getting hung up on this concept a little too much. Of course, using a password manager increases the attack surface in that if the encrypted passwords are stored on a server and the encryption wasn't good enough you're in trouble. But what you're talking about, where the plaintext password must be inserted into the web form, doesn't strike me as a vulnerability that would not exist without the password manager. If you simply memorized it you would still have to type it in. Moreover, keeping the password secret is not an end in itself, it's a tool to keep your actual secrets secret. If you login to some sort of account, and then access those secrets on your computer there's the analog hole again. If you don't have a computer on which it's safe to type in a password you don't have one on which it is safe to read or view your secrets.
- xnull2guest 12y agoCALEA, the Stored Communications Act and Section 215 of the Patriot Act all compel corporations (via the Department of Commerce) to build data and key escrow services into their products. For example on modern Windows systems bitlocker keys are automatically uploaded to the (automatically created for you) Onedrive account associated with the Microsoft Account created during your install and Onedrive is on PRISM. Searching for 380/286 classification patents in the US is one way to figure out some escrow mechanisms and companies, though it is not exhaustive nor does it only include federally-inspired escrow. All of this is remnants of the Clinton Administration and alternatives to the failed Clipper Chip, then increased in scope by the Bush and then Obama administration. There's a decently history that only captures the broad strokes up until the late '90s here: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0006231614.pdf http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0006231614.p...
- tptacek 12y agoCALEA does not require key escrow, nor, so far as I know, does PATRIOT s.215. From my work I'm personally aware of more than one major corporate effort to cryptographically protect user data for which key escrow was not only not implemented, but countermeasures above and beyond basic cryptographic best practices were implemented to mitigate likely user errors. None of these projects would seem to me to be possible if it were the case that the USG was requiring private companies to implement key escrow. In ~10 years of software security work performed for many of the largest companies in the world, I was never once asked to review a system that performed key escrow or anything like it (I would not work on such a system, nor would I or will I work on software security for the USG). Not only that, but having come into contact with source code, design documents, backend systems, and similar intimate technical details, I have never --- that I can recall --- even seen something like the backdoor you alluded to. Occam's Razor suggests to me that the popular idea that big tech companies spy on their users for the USG is fallacious. I've never looked at Bitlocker, though, so maybe I'm wrong.
- xnull2guest 12y agoCALEA requires a guarantee that customer traffic can be decrypted. S215 of the Patriot Act extends the larger body of the act and prior Acts to include "other artifacts". Though not specified, this presumably extends outside telecommunications. The Stored Communications Act similarly requires key (or data) escrow mechanisms. Here is a Microsoft Cloud Key Escrow system that "Once a request comes in from a third party (e.g. a user, a business, a legal entity or governmental entity, etc.) to access user's data, the data storage system may send..." https://www.google.com/patents/US20120321086 https://www.google.com/patents/US20120321086
- mendelk 12y agoObligatory (somewhat related) XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- sinwave 12y agoI've thought about this a little bit - I guess the security of the system depends on what you consider to be the channel, source, and destination. The argument is that |device|-------->network--------->|device| may be secure, but that doesn't mean |human|-->|device|-------->network--------->|device|-->|human| is secure!