Hacker News Reader

There's a huge difference between bomb making and crypto. To make a bomb, you need to gather materials and then carry out some difficult, dangerous steps to turn them into explosives and assemble a bomb. Then if you want another bomb, you have to do it again. If you want a bigger bomb, you need more materials. Consider that any random person can easily buy some ammonium nitrate, but if you try to buy enough to blow up a building without a legitimate reason, you'll run into major obstacles with the law.

Crypto is different. Once you set up crypto, you have it forever. Crypto that can encrypt 1kB can also encrypt 1TB. Crypto that works for one person can easily be made to work for a million people. Computers handle all the hard parts, and there's no obstacle to scale.

It's true that the government could require big companies to put in a master key. The problem is that criminals would trivially bypass such a requirement. There's no computer equivalent to requiring all ammonium nitrate sellers to report sales. And in the other direction, there's no physical equivalent to the havoc that would occur if the master key ever leaked. The risks and benefits are completely topsy turvy for a master key scheme.

Note that the government doesn't really try to restrict bomb making instructions, just bomb making materials. With crypto, the instructions are the only thing there is. There's no such thing as crypto materials, unless you propose to regulate CPUs in general.

You also don't have to build crypto from first principles, we have plenty of reusable software components at all layers of computing, that implement strong crypto.

This whole thing is a straw man.

It is we the people who should be dismantling the security state, in order to solve the terror/war problem - we sure as hell don't need career experts dictating this. The public truly needs to fight back on this.

Crypto is Math.

Broken crypto is broken Math. But Math is broken anyway, because we can't really stop people using Math to hurt us.

After Crypto being banned, what next? The Golden Rule?

We can't have Math, because "Terrorism".

The only solution is an open and honest society, in which sufficient resources are applied, at the human being level, to ensure that terrorism doesn't happen.

Like, we could deploy battleships with bombs all we want, but those same battleships would go a long way towards actually making peace in the world, by healing it instead.

But, we "can't do that", apparently, because "Threats/Force/Terror are more important".

Let we, the people, continue to use crypto to undo the need for such power structures as the NSA, and all the rest of the spooks ..

> There's no computer equivalent to requiring all ammonium nitrate sellers to report sales.

Say, perhaps, every processor had a 2nd processor attached, that would run code not modifiable by the owner? With little public information about it's full capabilities? That had full unfettered access to the primary processor, it's memory, and I/O Ports? And insist that it's mandatory to the function of the primary processor?

Sounds a lot like Intel'S ME?

Yep, but you're not going to do something like that with all the embedded CPUs out there, and they're still quite capable of crypto.

How does the ME determine if I’m running an encryption algorithm using a legal compromised key vs running illegal encryption with a non compromised key? And more importantly how does this ME turned spy actually determine what is encryption and what isn’t? It’d have to determine on the fly if all the operations on your computer were encryption-like because otherwise just tweaking the code so the outputs are identical but the instructions and memory access are vastly different would completely bypass the ME-snitch.

> Just like they control the sale of explosives, for public security, they can also require Microsoft, Apple and Google to put in a master-key. And I don't see a problem with that.

The problem is that there's no good way to control that master key. What do you do with it? Lock it on an encrypted USB drive in a fire proof safe bolted to the floor under the google headquarters?

That works until a police agency wants to use it. And then another.

How many people do you think you can reasonably give this key to before someone who isn't "supposed" to have it gets their hands on it?

What happens when a criminal gets his hands on the master key that unlocks every encryption made by apple, google and microsoft?

Regulate encryption like you regulate heavy weapons. You can carry a gun, but you can't carry an assault rifle. But you can get special permission for special cases.

Yes, the master key for your SMSes will be leaked pretty quickly, but every business with a legitimate use for encryption will be able to use it. In the end your bank account will not get hacked, terrorists will continue using strong encryption, but law enforcement will be pacified.

Regulating math is not something that usually has a good outcome. See the 1897 Indiana Pi Law for a good lesson in unintended consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Didn't the US try that one already?

I believe so: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

I was thinking more of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i..., actually, but that's a good example too.

You can't take a gun, put it into a machine, push a button, and have the machine make you a million guns. If you could, gun control would go from difficult and incomplete to downright impossible. That's how encryption is now.

Are you familiar with Defense Distributed, DEFCAD, and the Ghost Gunner? That stuff is already here. Every time I hear someone talk about banning "high capacity magazines" I think how trivial something like that is to 3d print...

I've heard about them a little. This stuff is definitely getting easier, but there's still a world of difference between the difficulty of replicating a gun and the difficulty of replicating a copy of crypto code.

"every business with a legitimate use for encryption" is "every business" (SSL and SSH, remember?). "Every business" is "every person", given sole corporations.

> In the end your bank account will not get hacked

Equifax are still trying to explain to congress whether or not they are encrypting data: https://www.wsj.com/articles/equifax-ceo-to-congress-not-sur...

> terrorists will continue using strong encryption

Terrorists don't generally use encryption, surprisingly. There have been very few incidents recently where the authorities have found themselves with data they were unable to decrypt that might be relevant. The only one I can think of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack

Many banks send 2FA codes via SMS, so I question how my bank account will not get hacked if the master key for SMSes gets leaked "pretty quickly".

> Regulate encryption like you regulate heavy weapons.

They were at one time. Encryption was regulated under the ITAR laws until 1997.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

> they can also require Microsoft, Apple and Google to put in a master-key. And I don't see a problem with that.

I do.

How much do you suppose such keys would be worth? Trillions of dollars?

Every nation-state and criminal organization on the planet would be after those keys. They'd use every technical and social trick in the book, including assassination, to get them.

The loss would be inevitable, swift, and disastrous.

Have a high schooler generate a one time pad. Unbreakable security in a simple system based on relatively simple mathematical concepts.

Yeah let's just walk around with our pants down because belts can be used to strangle people.

You can't download explosives. You can't type text into any computer and have it generate explosives.

Encryption is not a physical object, which makes it completely unlike explosives. Not only that, there isn't even a specific piece of software that is encryption, it is simply a series of math functions you run on data.

You can make all the rules in the world about companies having to have a master key. People have already downloaded PGP, it is too late to put that back in the bag.

unfortunately even goverments are not able to secure the private key part sufficient enough. Adding the risk of outdated devices with compromised keys would be catastrophic and force everyone to buy newer overpriced hardware, without in the end adding anything to our privacy anymore.

> But coding these algorithms is no joke.

They've already been written. RSA isn't going to magically disappear.

Open source implementations of quality crypto aren't going to up and vanish, just as how instructions to make bombs won't vanish.

Ostensibly, the crypto implementations available today will be good well into the future, barring quantum computing advances.

Implementations suffer not just from actual bugs, but from implementation choices that leak information (power consumption, timing data, etc...)

Crypto implementation available today are only good until they are not anymore and it's impossible to say when that might happen. For example, a new compiler optimization might expose something that wasn't previously exposed.

Side channel attacks are generally irrelevant for the scenario where a terrorist is using their own electronics to communicate with their fellows.

Which is the oft-cited reason we need government key escrow...

These situations do exist, but that doesn't change the point that the genie is out of the bottle.

People who want this software are going to be able to have it. End of story. If a timing attack happens to pop up in it, great, that's a win for the government. But by and large, these messages will go without decryption.

As with anything: these measures will not stop the determined lawbreaker - not that they necessarily need to.