Obama Administration Explored Ways To Bypass Smartphone Encryption

An anonymous reader writes: According to a story at The Washington Post, an Obama Administration working group considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow the government to break encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals. The group concluded that the solutions were "technically feasible," but they group feared blowback. "Any proposed solution almost certainly would quickly become a focal point for attacks. Rather than sparking more discussion, government-proposed technical approaches would almost certainly be perceived as proposals to introduce 'backdoors' or vulnerabilities in technology products and services and increase tensions rather [than] build cooperation," said the unclassified memo. You can read the draft paper on technical options here.

Comments

If they can break it, ANYONE can break it

[kheldan]

..and at that point it's useless. By all means, try to break it; if you can then that means it needs to be improved.

Re:If they can break it, ANYONE can break it

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can break it, ANYONE can break it

It's even worse than that.

Obviously the bad guys could break it, or steal the backdoor keys, or whatever.

But the worst part is that we don't know if any bad guys have broken it yet, so -- starting on day one -- we have to assume they have.

This is true even if the bad guys haven't actually broken it yet.

This means that backdoors are a failure up front, by design -- and not just if they break.

Why only say Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying it's Obama's Administration that did it is just as honest as saying it's Bush's Administration that allowed "enhanced interrogation" and detention facilities - it sure as hell didn't stop (or probably even start) with Bush, just like how breaking encryption sure as hell didn't begin with Obama. The problem is with the entire system, not just one political sports team or another.

Obama is All About Transparency!

[Irate Engineer]

Unfortunately he was thinking of one-way glass with the ability to look into our affairs.

Re: Obama is All About Transparency!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the black guy who promised "change". He knew he would not deliver but still acts like he's got the moral high ground. He does not. If you tell me you're going to something, you ask my backing on that condition and that renege, you broke your promise and I can call you a liar. I don't care if you're white, black, yellow or purple with green dots.

Re:I predict the future of a government API

[Attila Dimedici]

You seem to be missing the same thing the idiots trying to get this in place miss. If this gets implemented, it won't just be the governments with access...and because the people trying to implement this will want to be able to spy on people in government, it will be on government computers. If this gets implemented (and it may already be partially implemented), the world will get very ugly indeed, including for the people proposing it.

Re:practically true. Interesting theory $10 millio

[erikkemperman]

Now, we use Diffie-Hellman every day to do exactly that, as part of https. We thought it was impossible to share a secret on a public forum (or network) without everyone else on the forum being able to read the secret, but we were wrong. Diffie and Hellman invented a way.

Just thought I'd mention Ralph Merkle, the guy gets nowhere near fair credit for having co-invented public key cryptography. In fact, Hellman argues we should talk about Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange.

And there were some guys at GCHQ who independently did pretty much the same. But I credit them less because it was all kept secret and they work for, you know, evil.