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UK Government Wants Private Encryption Keys
An anonymous reader writes "Businesses and individuals in Britain may soon have to give their encryption keys to the police or face imprisonment. The UK government has said it will bring in the new powers to address a rise in the use of encryption by criminals and terrorists." From the article: "Some security experts are concerned that the plan could criminalise innocent people and drive businesses out of the UK. But the Home Office, which has just launched a consultation process, says the powers contained in Part 3 are needed to combat an increased use of encryption by criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists. 'The use of encryption is... proliferating,' Liam Byrne, Home Office minister of state told Parliament last week. 'Encryption products are more widely available and are integrated as security features in standard operating systems, so the Government has concluded that it is now right to implement the provisions of Part 3 of RIPA... which is not presently in force.'"
I assume that the there is a simmaler rule for safes/lockbox combinations.
Most major companies have offices all around the world, presumably. So now they'll have to have a separate (pretty much disposable) encryption method just for the UK?
What about communication between offices on the internet? A japanese analyst creates some research, but due to technical problems the only Compliance office up is in Europe. So every program or service that can comminicate with Britain has to check if a request is going to/through the UK before applying the "approved" encryption.
To quote, "this is madness"
"England Prevails"
Parliment better watch out... hear there's a train heading there loaded with fireworks and other things that go boom.
-zariok-
Methinks the UK government doesn't know that what it wants is technologically infeasible....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Simple solution: You have a new encryption scheme where there are 2 private keys. The first one allows decryption, the second wipes the drive. Guess which one you give to the police?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I'm sure the criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists will just be lining up to hand over their keys, too.
That's the odd thing about this. You can get up to 2 or 5 years in the can (depending on if they think you're a terrorist). So if you have gigs of terrorist info that could get you sent away for life, just say you lost your keys and go away for 5 years max.
Trolling is a art,
Encryption may not be a must for most people, but keeping the government out of one's private business is a must for all people, everywhere.
English is easier said than done.
This is an example of the government passing bad laws which have no real effect on terrorism, it's just posturing. It'll be impossible to prove that a person really knows the encryption key or if the key that was coerced from them is the real key.
These days encryption software like truecrypt have multiple levels of "plausible deniability" so even if a key was coerced out of someone you don't know if the data that is decrypted is the real deal or just another decoy.
These so called government security advisers really don't know anything about security. The UK Government can't even remember to deport foreign criminals after they server their sentence. The country will be a lot safer if the Government fixed their own incompetence rather than pass TROLL laws which deprive the real law abiding citizens of their liberties whilst allowing the terrorists to carry on business as usual.
I think this will increase the proliferation of encryption technologies which provide a certain level of plausible deniability. Things like TrueCrypt (http://truecrypt.org/) provide an encrypted container which has a basic access and a secondary access. The container cannot be detected as being an encrypted anything - it is just a bunch of random data. If you use the basic access mechanism, you get your data. If you use the secondary access, you get an alternate contents, which can be seemingly important, but relatively benign data you put there to look like soemone got something important. However, you cannot tell which one is which, or even that the alternate access isn't the primary one.
TrueCrypt lets you mount the container as a filesystem, which is a convenient way to go. This sort of thing allows you to:
a) Deny that there is anything encrypted for which you have not proffered a key. "Oh yeah, show me what I have encrypted and I'll show you the key."
b) If that's not enough, proffer the false key that gives them the alternative access. "Ok, here you go. Let me know if you find anything incriminating. (tee hee)"
Lastly, if you use things like encrypted swap on a unix device, you can plausably say that what is there is just an encrypted swap file, and you don't have a key because the key is never saved to the disk. Why isn't it mounted now? You only set it up temporarily and forgot to delete the file when it was done. (for 1Gb files or larger...) If you have a 20Gb file, you're probably going to have to explain it... and go for option (b) above.
Of course, if your 20Gb file is not a file, but is just an "empty" partition... well there you go.
Please note - I'm not advocating breaking any law here - just outlining what this will drive people who care enough to do.
i - This sig provided by
I'm a political scientist by education. Where does that put me in your example?
It means that you have been fully indoctrinated to accept the political and social assumptions of your society, and you now indoctrinate others into those assumptions... in such a way that it perpetuates the current political system. You are to the modern state what a priest is in Catholisism.
An example of a political assumption in a society would be something like the debate over government's role in health care in Europe. There are those who argue that equality of care (everyone is entitled to equal care) is why health care should be provided and controled by the government... and those that disagree. There are those who argue that no-one should be without health care, and therefore the state should provide it to everyone... and there are those that disagree. BUT, no one questions the idea that the government can or will provide truly equal care, or that the government can or will provide the care to everyone. The political assumption is that government never fails to provide people with services, and that government always provides those services in a manner that is equal to everyone. Even the people who are against the state's intervention into health care don't question that government will provide health care, and they don't question that the government will do it with absolute equality.
In a reasonable debate, you would hear people argue that states have engaged in terrible acts of inequality... in fact the worst acts of inequality, such as mass genocide, have been commited by the state. In a reasonable debate one would argue that states have often commited horrible failures in providing services to it's citizens, in some cases resulting in millions of deaths. Yet, in modern mainstream political debate, it is unheard of and inconceivable that someone could support universal and equal health care for everyone, and also not support state control of health care. In mainstream politics, if you support equal and universal health care, YOU MUST SUPPORT STATE RUN HEALTHCARE. Through political "scientists" such as yourself, and many years of indoctrination and government controlled education, you have been able to control people's thoughs as such that THE STATE = EQUALITY, and THE STATE = PROVIDING FOR THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY... and to be against the state is to be against equality and providing for the needs of everyone. As a "scientist", you should be able to step out of your views for a second and see that is a very powerful form of brainwashing!
Your job, as a political scientist, is to maintain a faith in the state and political process. You may question a specific government policy (but that is like questioning what type of sandwich I should eat for dinner... there is a big assumption that I should be eating dinner, and that my dinner should be a sandwich), but your job is to make sure all debate about the political sytem preserves the political system.
Now, I will admit I am stereotyping political science people. I suppose there are few token anarchists or libertarians or classical liberals in the political science field. But I think that you would probably agree, that anarchists or libertarians or classical liberals are probably few and far between in the field of political science. You wouldn't expect a political scientists to be against the political system, any more than you would expect a carpenter to be against wood.
Just create a couple gigs of nothing but encryption keys on your hard disk, then choose an arbitrary number of them randomly whenever you want to encrypt something. When they want the keys... give them the entire contents of that partition.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.