Slashdot Mirror
Crypto Experts Blast Gov't Backdoors For Encryption
loid_void writes with a link to a New York Times report about some of the world's best-known cryptography experts, who have prepared a report which concludes that there is
no viable technical solution which "would allow the American and British governments to gain "exceptional access" to encrypted communications without putting the world's most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger." From the article:
[T]he government’s plans could affect the technology used to lock financial institutions and medical data, and poke a hole in mobile devices and the countless other critical systems — including pipelines, nuclear facilities, the power grid — that are moving online rapidly. ...
“The problems now are much worse than they were in 1997,” said Peter G. Neumann, a co-author of both the 1997 report and the new paper, who is a computer security pioneer at SRI International, the Silicon Valley research laboratory. “There are more vulnerabilities than ever, more ways to exploit them than ever, and now the government wants to dumb everything down further.”
The authors include Neumann, Harold Abelson, Susan Landau, and Bruce Schneier.
You cannot, under any circumstances, convince the government that having a backdoor into all those things is a bad thing.
Who doesn't know that backdoors are there for everyone who finds them and not just those who put it there?
Who would buy a lock from a company that made a master key that was good in all of their locks? Of course, they would promise to only release that key to authorized people. However, it is certain that eventually it will get into criminal hands. At that point, there is lots of money to be made from selling the key. Of course, lock companies could make lots of money off this proposal, but not the one who made the master key. The government might as well give up on a web based economy and go back to paper banking if they start giving out keys to all of the transactions.