5 ms·

Keeping Secrets

240 points by ghosh 12y ago

dsymonds 12y ago
This is a good read, though it curiously omits mentioning that the NSA's twiddling of DES's S-boxes turned out to have made DES stronger rather than weaker. That seems like a pretty important note in the story. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27...)
eps 12y ago
Pardon the longer quote, but I want to comment on this - Rather than trying to understand both sides of the issue and make the “right” decision, Hellman said that in the heat of the controversy, he listened to his ego instead. It was not until Hellman watched Day After Trinity, a documentary about the development of the atomic bomb, that he realized how dangerous his decision- making process had been. The moment in the film that troubled him most, he recalled, was when the Manhattan Project scientists tried to explain why they continued to work on the bomb after Hitler had been defeated and the threat of a German atom bomb had disappeared. The scientists “had figured out what they wanted to do and had then come up with a rationalization for doing it, rather than figuring out the right thing to do and doing it whether or not it was what they wanted to do." This attitude - screw the consequences, let's just scratch my curiosity itch - is extremely common in tech circles. Cryptonomicon did a good job presenting this issue in a highly digested form - that is when the Avi character is setting up a data haven for all the good reasons and the only people that show up for the (funding) presentation are the criminals and rogue government agents. I was messing with anonymous private p2p systems at the time when the book came out and it was frankly a shock to read, because somehow it was an obvious angle that I never considered at all. I was just engineering stuff because it was really interesting, but never did I consider the consequences of actual application. Realizing that there's an ethical component to every technical project was quite an eye-opener and it had profound effect on how was viewing projects ever since. Perhaps it's obvious to some or a non-issue to others, but then perhaps there are those here who can relate...
- ableal 12y ago
  A short story that I read many years ago, possibly in an SF anthology, has stayed with me. I've forgotten who's the author, and don't necessarily agree with his point, but it is a good parable. Briefly, a man comes to the house of a famous scientist, who happens to have a mentally disabled son. The unknown visitor comes to plead, politely, for the scientist to cease working on a super-weapon project. He is heard, but is rejected. The visitor accepts it well, and asks to use the bathroom before leaving. After he has left, the scientist finds out that the man has given a gun to his son. He manages to get hold of the weapon without mishap, and wonders what kind of man would give a loaded gun to a disabled child ...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Frederic Brown, The Weapon http://writenowisgood.wordpress.com/the-weapon-questions/ http://writenowisgood.wordpress.com/the-weapon-questions/
- arethuza 12y ago
  One of the many memorable parts of Cryptonomicon is where Randy asks Avi how long he wants to keep his secrets safe and gets the answer: "I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil."
- danielweber 12y ago
  There are generally three possible thought processes to a new technology: 1. This technology will be great! I'll be a hero! 2. Technology is value-neutral. Those who use it have their own agency in how they use it. 3. This technology could have bad side-effects and I should face them. "1" is very common. "3" is extremely rare. I find "2" intellectually defensible if a bit dodgy. I wish more technologists wondered about the end result of their pursuits. Instead, they see themselves as the protagonists in their own story, and anyone else who gets caught up should just deal with it.
  - sneak 12y ago
    Another important consideration in #3 is that "this technology could have side-effects like enabling behaviors that society (or the government, presumably a proxy for society's will) currently consider bad and illegal, that i think should be enabled regardless." The origin of the definition of "bad" is important. Many things are illegal that should not be. It's important to build tools to help people break certain unjust laws.
nly 12y ago
> According to Inman, the uptake of the research community’s cryptographic ideas came at a much slower pace than he had expected. As a result, less foreign traffic ended up being encrypted than the agency had projected, and the consequences for national security were not as dramatic as he had feared. Essentially, Inman recalled, “there was no demand” for encryption systems outside of governments, even though many high-grade systems eventually became available. Some things don't change. Despite the fact that the bedrock of basically all noteworthy asymmetric cryptography was laid in just a handful of years 40 years ago, and despite the fact we've had crypto protocols to solve a lot of really compelling problems for decades, the NSA, and government generally, still has little worry about. The market has a way of selecting really lowsy solutions when it comes to privacy. Consider: - The abysmal state of implementation. Over-engineered, poorly designed, poorly implemented, and poorly deployed. Did I miss the memo for the billions of dollars of investment and meticulous engineering being poured in to the cryptography Space Race? I guess a couple of OpenSSL forks is a start, right? - Zero adoption of personal digital signatures. Zilch. Nudda. You can't prove authorship of anything, and can be framed for almost anything. None of the logs being made of your activities are seen by you, let alone signed-off by you as authentic. - The complete lack of good, usable, client authentication. We've known how to do secure password authentication, even in the presence of weak passwords, since before the web existed, yet we have nothing. Google authenticator is the only meaningful contribution to authentication on the web since the 90s (Pretty much all the third-party systems conflate the issue of identification and authorisation) - Complete centralisation of interpersonal messaging (Email -> Your webmail provider, SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger etc). It's all unencrypted, logged, and subverted for government or commercial interests. - Blackboxification of consumer electronics. Yet somehow, despite the urgency in keeping DRM keys secret, essentially the same technology, we don't have usable HSMs in consumer devices like phones yet. - Extensive surveillance of all our financial activity. Our supermarkets can track our personal shopping habits down to the items we buy week on week, and our banks knows where you like to buy your Sunday lunch. We've known how to achieve cash-equivalent privacy digitally for 20 years. All we have is Bitcoin which, while heading in the right direction on trust, serves some grand libertarian ideal and accomplishes little in terms of privacy or user friendliness. Go read about Digicash, in another life it could have shipped with Windows 95. - The complete lack of good trust models and, more importantly, the lack of any education or inclination amongst the general public, particularly among the young and technologically comfortable, to question whether we should really be trusting website X, company Y or app Q with our personal data and habits. Social networks have changed attitudes toward sharing our personal life in one generation. My dad considers Facebook statuses bizarre. My grandma still doesn't trust plastic or direct debits, and prefers cash. We're caught in a generation gap where we have no reason to trust many entities, but have so much incentive to risk it anyway. ... clearly the demand for cryptography is still low.
squozzer 12y ago
I don't have a problem with the way things turned out. An equally plausible scenario would be if the researchers had just surrendered to the Feds then we would have nothing until it was too late. The Feds like to squeeze - that's their job. It's why Congress usually takes care in limiting the scope of their activities. But had the researchers acted "reasonably", they'd probably be working in some basement a la Dan Akroyd's character in "Spies Like Us."
andrew93101 12y ago
Not directly related but a fun fact: GCHQ had discovered both RSA and Diffie Hellman asymmetric crypto years earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks
dthal 12y ago
From Hellman's letter to Stanford's attorney: >Although it is a remote possibility, the danger of initially inadvertent police state type surveillance through computerization must be considered. Yup...I'd say we've pretty well backed in to it.

240 points by ghosh 12y ago

This is a good read, though it curiously omits mentioning that the NSA's twiddling of DES's S-boxes turned out to have made DES stronger rather than weaker. That seems like a pretty important note in the story. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27...)

eps 12y ago

Pardon the longer quote, but I want to comment on this - Rather than trying to understand both sides of the issue and make the “right” decision, Hellman said that in the heat of the controversy, he listened to his ego instead. It was not until Hellman watched Day After Trinity, a documentary about the development of the atomic bomb, that he realized how dangerous his decision- making process had been. The moment in the film that troubled him most, he recalled, was when the Manhattan Project scientists tried to explain why they continued to work on the bomb after Hitler had been defeated and the threat of a German atom bomb had disappeared. The scientists “had figured out what they wanted to do and had then come up with a rationalization for doing it, rather than figuring out the right thing to do and doing it whether or not it was what they wanted to do." This attitude - screw the consequences, let's just scratch my curiosity itch - is extremely common in tech circles. Cryptonomicon did a good job presenting this issue in a highly digested form - that is when the Avi character is setting up a data haven for all the good reasons and the only people that show up for the (funding) presentation are the criminals and rogue government agents. I was messing with anonymous private p2p systems at the time when the book came out and it was frankly a shock to read, because somehow it was an obvious angle that I never considered at all. I was just engineering stuff because it was really interesting, but never did I consider the consequences of actual application. Realizing that there's an ethical component to every technical project was quite an eye-opener and it had profound effect on how was viewing projects ever since. Perhaps it's obvious to some or a non-issue to others, but then perhaps there are those here who can relate...

ableal 12y ago
A short story that I read many years ago, possibly in an SF anthology, has stayed with me. I've forgotten who's the author, and don't necessarily agree with his point, but it is a good parable. Briefly, a man comes to the house of a famous scientist, who happens to have a mentally disabled son. The unknown visitor comes to plead, politely, for the scientist to cease working on a super-weapon project. He is heard, but is rejected. The visitor accepts it well, and asks to use the bathroom before leaving. After he has left, the scientist finds out that the man has given a gun to his son. He manages to get hold of the weapon without mishap, and wonders what kind of man would give a loaded gun to a disabled child ...
- walterbell 12y ago
  Frederic Brown, The Weapon http://writenowisgood.wordpress.com/the-weapon-questions/ http://writenowisgood.wordpress.com/the-weapon-questions/
arethuza 12y ago
One of the many memorable parts of Cryptonomicon is where Randy asks Avi how long he wants to keep his secrets safe and gets the answer: "I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil."
danielweber 12y ago
There are generally three possible thought processes to a new technology: 1. This technology will be great! I'll be a hero! 2. Technology is value-neutral. Those who use it have their own agency in how they use it. 3. This technology could have bad side-effects and I should face them. "1" is very common. "3" is extremely rare. I find "2" intellectually defensible if a bit dodgy. I wish more technologists wondered about the end result of their pursuits. Instead, they see themselves as the protagonists in their own story, and anyone else who gets caught up should just deal with it.
- sneak 12y ago
  Another important consideration in #3 is that "this technology could have side-effects like enabling behaviors that society (or the government, presumably a proxy for society's will) currently consider bad and illegal, that i think should be enabled regardless." The origin of the definition of "bad" is important. Many things are illegal that should not be. It's important to build tools to help people break certain unjust laws.

nly 12y ago

> According to Inman, the uptake of the research community’s cryptographic ideas came at a much slower pace than he had expected. As a result, less foreign traffic ended up being encrypted than the agency had projected, and the consequences for national security were not as dramatic as he had feared. Essentially, Inman recalled, “there was no demand” for encryption systems outside of governments, even though many high-grade systems eventually became available. Some things don't change. Despite the fact that the bedrock of basically all noteworthy asymmetric cryptography was laid in just a handful of years 40 years ago, and despite the fact we've had crypto protocols to solve a lot of really compelling problems for decades, the NSA, and government generally, still has little worry about. The market has a way of selecting really lowsy solutions when it comes to privacy. Consider: - The abysmal state of implementation. Over-engineered, poorly designed, poorly implemented, and poorly deployed. Did I miss the memo for the billions of dollars of investment and meticulous engineering being poured in to the cryptography Space Race? I guess a couple of OpenSSL forks is a start, right? - Zero adoption of personal digital signatures. Zilch. Nudda. You can't prove authorship of anything, and can be framed for almost anything. None of the logs being made of your activities are seen by you, let alone signed-off by you as authentic. - The complete lack of good, usable, client authentication. We've known how to do secure password authentication, even in the presence of weak passwords, since before the web existed, yet we have nothing. Google authenticator is the only meaningful contribution to authentication on the web since the 90s (Pretty much all the third-party systems conflate the issue of identification and authorisation) - Complete centralisation of interpersonal messaging (Email -> Your webmail provider, SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger etc). It's all unencrypted, logged, and subverted for government or commercial interests. - Blackboxification of consumer electronics. Yet somehow, despite the urgency in keeping DRM keys secret, essentially the same technology, we don't have usable HSMs in consumer devices like phones yet. - Extensive surveillance of all our financial activity. Our supermarkets can track our personal shopping habits down to the items we buy week on week, and our banks knows where you like to buy your Sunday lunch. We've known how to achieve cash-equivalent privacy digitally for 20 years. All we have is Bitcoin which, while heading in the right direction on trust, serves some grand libertarian ideal and accomplishes little in terms of privacy or user friendliness. Go read about Digicash, in another life it could have shipped with Windows 95. - The complete lack of good trust models and, more importantly, the lack of any education or inclination amongst the general public, particularly among the young and technologically comfortable, to question whether we should really be trusting website X, company Y or app Q with our personal data and habits. Social networks have changed attitudes toward sharing our personal life in one generation. My dad considers Facebook statuses bizarre. My grandma still doesn't trust plastic or direct debits, and prefers cash. We're caught in a generation gap where we have no reason to trust many entities, but have so much incentive to risk it anyway. ... clearly the demand for cryptography is still low.

squozzer 12y ago

I don't have a problem with the way things turned out. An equally plausible scenario would be if the researchers had just surrendered to the Feds then we would have nothing until it was too late. The Feds like to squeeze - that's their job. It's why Congress usually takes care in limiting the scope of their activities. But had the researchers acted "reasonably", they'd probably be working in some basement a la Dan Akroyd's character in "Spies Like Us."

andrew93101 12y ago

Not directly related but a fun fact: GCHQ had discovered both RSA and Diffie Hellman asymmetric crypto years earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks

dthal 12y ago

From Hellman's letter to Stanford's attorney: >Although it is a remote possibility, the danger of initially inadvertent police state type surveillance through computerization must be considered. Yup...I'd say we've pretty well backed in to it.