News.com: Crypto Doesn't Kill - People Do

McSpew writes: "Bravo to News.com for telling the truth about cryptography. They even cited /.'s coverage of Phil Zimmerman's real views on PGP and its possible role in any terrorist acts." On a per-word basis, this may be the best summary of why calls to ban or restrict encryption technology (as with government key escrow, or constrained key sizes) has little to do with enhancing national or world security.

Comments

one-time pads

[corebreech]

A good article that could be made better by emphasizing the one-time pad cipher.

The one-time pad is a very easy cipher to explain to lay people. They need no understanding of math, not even arithmetic.

Anybody, anywhere can create a one-time pad by simply flipping a coin or rolling the dice, and use the resulting information to encrypt a message that is impervious to all manners of cryptoanalysis, even techniques made possible by the much-feared though yet-to-be-stocked quantum computer.

In other words, you can create a encrypted message without encryption software or even a computer, and yet be assured that the message is unreadable by any computer devisable today or anytime in the future.

There should be no debate here. Military-grade cryptography is available to anyone with a penny in their pocket and a sheet of paper and pencil.

We need to stop wasting time talking about this.

Re:one-time pads

[AndrewHowe]

"each message contains in it the one time pad for the next message"
This is not such a good idea. A one time pad is to be used once, and that means you certainly can't repeat it within a single message. Therefore, each message would have to contain a one time pad that was large enough to encrypt the whole of the next message, including the one time pad in that, and so on. Obviously this means your messages will get shorter and shorter!

Re:one-time pads

[Sly Mongoose]

If you have a secure channel to transfer the one-time pad why bother with encryption in the first place?

Because you can exchange fat one-time pads when all the conspirators are crouched around a camel-dung fire one night. Then use the pad for secure communications over the weeks and months that follow.

That pad must to somehow be secured like a codebook or it is useless.

It is much more difficult to frisk every person on the street looking for a one-time pad than it is to CARNIVORE every e-mail on the backbone and peek through the backdoor.

One-time pads is a wonderful theoretical idea but one that is useless in most real world applications.

If secure communications are required and backdoors are a threat, the inconvenience will have to be tolerated.

Central Asia tech support

[4thAce]

No doubt there are any number of capable computer scientists in the Middle East and Central Asia whom these groups can turn to in a pinch for technical assistance.

They could post their encryption concerns to a site http://slashdot.af/index.pl?section=askslashdot for instance. But I don't think the Taliban would let them call the intellectual currency "karma."

Crypto Kills

[Anonymous Coward]

Re read that article, but swap every occurrence of "crypto" with "guns".

Now you know what all the gun nuts were talking about.

It's already been done wth handguns - I figured all guns were next, but looks like crypto is next.

He's missed the point

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The security agencies are already checking through most or a statistical useful percentage of the bytes that flow over the US internet, and are characterising it all. Their actions only make sense if they are doing that.

Anyone using encryption stands out; so they write a file on them.

Where they find encrypted data they can't characterise it any further; so they hit a brick wall. But its not common right now, so they can make a file. However, if everyone on the internet routinely uses uncrackable encryption they can't build a file on everyone.

On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.

Of course this 'monitor all the traffic on the internet idea' falls down in several other ways. As an example, suppose somebody creates a Quake III server that has some sort of low bandwidth messaging in it perhaps the player steps left at careful timed moments or something, the characterisation by the NSA would be, oh its just another Quake player, when really its sending an encrypted message as well. [I just made that Quake idea up- its called 'steganography' in general, hiding encrypted messages in something else.]

Anyway, that's really what's going on. The security agencies are using the WTC disaster as a chance to get their legislation through whilst the going is good. Of course anyone with any sense can evade it, but not every terrorist has sense.

Letters to congress people.

[Crixus]

One week ago today, I wrote essentially the same thing to my congress people. Here is my letter in case anyone else would like to send it to their congress critters:

------

Honorable Senator xxxxxx,

I am writing to bring to your attention the pointlessness of Senator Judd Gregg's new legislation mandating backdoors in all cryptographic products. I could make many arguments that discuss our civil liberties and the right to be secure within our papers and possessions, but that argument while true and immensely important, is not even required in this case.

Simply put, with respect to strong cryptographic software, the "cat is out of the bag." The world is already full of good, secure cryptographic products with no backdoors. That is the case now, and was PRIOR to Congress' reduction of ITAR restrictions that kept us from exporting strong cryptographic products.

The world is full of smart people many of whom do not work for the NSA, and do not live within the United States. These people in the civilian cryptographic world are constantly researching and developing new cryptographic techniques, which Senator Gregg's legislation WILL NOT AFFECT. No matter how many laws you pass, NOTHING will keep the BAD GUYS from being able to download this cryptographic software from European and other web sites.

If Europe latches on to Senator Gregg's idea of mandating backdoors in all cryptographic products, then the people who want to use cryptographic products with no backdoors will simply write their own, or copy VERBATIM the computer source code for strong cryptographic software that already exists in many hundreds of published books.

Allow me to quote Bruce Schneier, perhaps the United States' leading civilian cryptographic expert:

"To illustrate the ease with which a cryptosystem can be implemented, I present the full code necessary for establishing a secure cryptographic channel over the internet, called the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. Both people communicating do the following:

"1. Get public key (Y, P) of the other person. This is just a pair of large numbers.

"2. Raise Y to the power of X, where X is the private key, modulo P. The result is the secret key.

"Modular arithmetic is taught to fourth-graders under the name 'clock math,' and secret-key cryptosystems are just as easy to memorize and implement as public-key systems. I could teach any twelve-year-old how to reproduce from memory in under fifteen minutes a strong cryptosystem on any Windows machine. Any terrorist is quite capable of doing the same."

This speaks volumes about the current state of cryptographic software in the world today, and the ease with which it can be implemented.

If Senator Gregg's legislation is passed, it will have ZERO affect on the people who DO have things to hide from you, and will only harm the innocent citizens of the United States who wish nothing more than to insure that their banking records and private email conversations remain truly private.

Regards,

-----

Rich...

Re:Stop this mess !

[peppy]

It seems the terrorists didn't even bother to encrypt their emails either according to this article in the UK Guardian newspaper.

"FBI investigators had been able to locate hundreds of email communications, sent 30 to 45 days before the attack....According to the FBI, the conspirators had not used encryption or concealment methods. Once found, the emails could be openly read."

Close, but not quite....

[Deskpoet]

Though I agree with everything you said, the fundamental problem goes a bit deeper than privacy.

The full underlying cause of this is nationalism and the belief that the State is an almost divine entity that will protect you from all ills provided you play by its rules.

History shows that this is a fool's bargain. Any state--and yes, flag-wavers, that includes the US--is *designed* to limit your freedoms for the "greater good". While this works for a great many people indoctrinated to accept the definitions the State provides for "freedom" and "democracy", it is not, nor has it ever been, a complete solution for people in the world, and *much* has been done in the name of the State--like much was done in the name of God before it--that is simply hateful and evil.

Allegiance to the State, a belief that the State is all, that you should be proud to be part of the State, happened in Germany in the 1930s, and it appears to be happening here. Based on some of the troll posts here, you just have to substitute Arab for Jew, and you have the basic plank of the Nazi party flying in full colors.

How does this relate to crypto? It doesn't really at all--that's the point. But, if we're really trying to make a connection, then there's the tenuous observation that crypto is math, and knows no allegiance to State, which has no allegiance to you, meaning that Crypto is like the State in that it is an abstract concept without any feeling or allegiance to anyone or anything. The major difference between Crypto and the State is that the State is established, has full access to social control mechanisms, and panders to people's senses of belonging while Crypto is simply math that individuals can use to keep pieces of themselves from the State and unto themselves.

It is natural that the State--which *fully* seeks the totality of National Socialism, and now has the capacity to make _1984_ look like a Disneyland ride--would seek to abolish the one tool that can put an individual on equal footing with it. It's up to *us* to drop our allegiance to one abstract concept and rally our efforts around the other.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which way the wind appears to be blowing.