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India's Worrying Draft Encryption Policy
knwny writes: The government of India is working on a new National Encryption Policy the contents of which have raised a few alarms.Among other things, the policy states that citizens and businesses must save all encrypted messages (including personal or unofficial ones) and their plaintext copies for 90 days and make them available to law enforcement agencies as and when demanded. The policy also specifies that only the government of India shall define the algorithms and key sizes for encryption in India. The policy is posted on this website.
What happens if, by accident or malicious intent, the storage medium you are using is destroyed? Or ironically enough, if you are attacked with malware that encrypts your drive. How do you explain that you can't decrypt the drive to so they can decrypt your messages? Or that the cloud solution provider you were using is down for a undetermined amount of time?
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
the use of Indian consultants is about to drop dramatically.
And here we go with yet another example of politicians and other assholes with no technical understanding deciding to legislate "solutions" for their needs without the barest understanding of reality.
Yet another country who has decided their need to spy magically changes how technology works.
And, as usual, this will never work in practice.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This'll just drive the use of steganography, and then the government won't even know when there ARE messages.
If I'm accessing an https website in India that would mean that I would have to copy everything I typed in and save it for 90 days. That's every web search, amazon review, etc.
I see nothing about the number of iterations. There are going to be an awful lot of pissed off spys when they find that decrypting a messages gives them another encrypted message
I wonder how this'll affect the companies that outsource stuff over to India and how badly this screw over their customers. I mean, I would imagine many of these outsourced services will need access to customer records and stuff from the company that hired them, but if the government insists on downgrading encryption and stuff it'll make it much easier for attackers to gain unauthorized access or for them to eavesdrop on stuff.
...always trying to invade the privacy of their citizens. I'm just thankful that I Iive in the U.S.A. where that kind of thing... Oh, wait...
The problem, though, that even the 90 day limit is too much to require. Suppose you go to check your Gmail account. You've accessed it via HTTPS which means it's encrypted which means you now need to keep unencrypted versions of all of your e-mails for 90 days. Yes, even that Nigerian prince e-mail that you immediately went to delete as spam. First, you must save it without encryption and only then can you delete it. This will either a) make using any form of encryption too much of a hassle thus leaving communications open for "security agencies" to look through or b) will result in mass violation of the law which means anyone who runs afoul of the wrong official can be jailed for failing to keep unencrypted copies.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So, the Indian Govt thinks that intentionally weak crypto and forced plain text long term storage is a good idea? Never mind what the US might do with this. India's strategic and economic competitor is China, which will thus get so much more info product with so much less effort.
On the flip side, this may be so unacceptable to the business sector that it'll become another source of graft for officials to look the other way. Aka, The "Bureaucrat Bonus" Bill. Something for everyone.
Luke, help me take this mask off
too late for me, I already burned my rot13 card.
try getting THAT data back, suckers!
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Waitaminute. If an Indian watches a DRMed movie, he'll be required by law to have cracked it and ripped it? If I sell DRMed media to Indians, am I going to automatically be a conspirator, if my customer doesn't crack it?
There needs to be a DRM exception.
And I'd rather not discuss the consequences of such an exception. ;-)
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