Internet Firms To Be Banned From Offering Unbreakable Encryption Under New UK Laws (telegraph.co.uk)

Retron writes: Despite statements from the minister for internet safety and security Baroness Shields last week that the UK government would not require software developers to build backdoors into their products, the Telegraph is reporting that the UK Government is going to ban companies from offering 'unbreakable' encryption, effectively requiring a backdoor in products from the likes of Google and Apple. The reasons given are that they don't want the likes of terrorists and paedophiles to communicate in places the Police can't reach. A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts."

Comments

Sigh

[MPBoulton]

Is this the sort of thing that the EU could override?

Re:Sigh

[JaredOfEuropa]

They could. It depends on who wins. The industry lobbyists (extremely influential in Brussels) who don't give a rodent's behind for your privacy but do not want the risk and hassle that comes with a ban on crypto. Or the hawkish commissioners and their backers in national governments, who do not give a rodent's behind for your privacy and who would absolutely abhor "clear oversight and a robust legal framework" around surveillance.

And don't think for a second that this is about terrorists and paedophiles. There are enough crypto products for them to choose from already.

Re:Sigh

[nospam007]

"Is this the sort of thing that the EU could override?"

Yes, that's why the morons want out.

Also, by definition, no encryption is unbreakable, you just need a few thousand years to crack it.

Re:Sigh

[Noryungi]

Is this the sort of thing that the EU could override?

Of course not. The European Union wants the exact same thing. They just take a more circuitous route to reach the same conclusion.

Don't believe me? Read it and weep.

Money quote from the above link:

As part of the focus on cybercrime the EC [European Commission] said it is important that, while the privacy of citizens should be respected, the right data for law enforcement agencies is also vital to protect Europe’s security.

“Clear rules are needed to ensure that data protection principles are respected in full, while law enforcement gains access to the data it needs to protect the privacy of citizens against cybercrime and identity theft,” the report said.

The strategy also calls for greater cooperation between all elements of society when tackling cybercrime, so that key information is shared with all relevant parties.

Crypto War II. It's what's for breakfast. Download your copy of GPG while it's hot.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the sort of thing that both the commons and the lords could override because contrary to the sensationalist Slashdot headline it's not actually a law, it's a proposed law, and that means it has to both be debated and pass in both houses. That wont happen because the Lords are out for blood right now and the Conservatives don't have a majority there.

I'm actually willing to bet money that this clause will never make it into the final bill that is signed into law and as much as Slashdot babies will piss, cry and moan "ORWELL CCTV OMG FASCIST UK" they'll be missing the actual point - that's exactly what the likes of Theresa May want. Propose something really bad that will never pass, and watch the less bad (but still not wanted) stuff slide through under the radar because all the civil liberties activists and people like Slashtards were too focussed on the thing that was never going to make it through anyway whilst the MPs play the heroes for "compromising" in giving way to us on something they were always going to have give way to us on anyway.

Luckily May has the likes of The Torygraph making it easier for her by stirring up the fears because if it's in a newspaper then it must be true that this will become law right?

Re:Sigh

[wonkey_monkey]

you just need a few thousand years to crack it.

If I XOR some data with a key of unknown length, how are you going to verify that you've cracked it?

Re:Sigh

[Coisiche]

Coming soon, the campaign for Brexit which is the word already being used for the campaign for the UK to exit the EU. Obviously the Daily Mail and the Daily Express will be full champions of it and have been seeding discontent with the EU among their readership for years. I'm not sure how the rest of the media are going to line up but the unfortunately the result will be decided by the high population concentration of the south-east of the UK who outnumber the rest of us and seem particularly susceptible to "it's all Johnny Foreigner's fault" thinking. And I don't think that's a sweeping generalisation.

Re:Sigh

[Midnight Thunder]

"Is this the sort of thing that the EU could override?"

Yes, that's why the morons want out.

Also, by definition, no encryption is unbreakable, you just need a few thousand years to crack it.

Or the right algorithms, the right computing power and encryption that is regulated to be limited to a certain level? I am sure Interpol or various intelligence agencies could push to have the right tools?

The problem with what the British government is asking is that it just takes one slip for the backdoor to be left wide open (see TSA security keys) and anyone who really cares about protecting their stuff and understands what they are doing probably will just encrypt their stuff with other encryption tools, that don't follow the rules. In the end what they are asking for only burns the general public.

The other thing is to compare decryption time to Moore's Law and thus estimating what sort of encryption level is needed for a given point in time (see here)

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Also, by definition, no encryption is unbreakable, you just need a few thousand years to crack it.

Untrue. Encryption may be "Information-Theoretically secure". These cannot be broken with just enough computing power. For example, for ordinary text, this is even true for the venerable Enigma if less than 4000 Bits (if I remember things correctly) of ciphertext are available and the key was chosen at random. One-time pad based encryptions are never breakable, the only information you get is the maximum number of Entropy in the message, nothing else.

You wrong statement is one of the often-repeated untruths about encryption.

Re:Sigh

[Zocalo]

While you are right on the voting demographic and media bias/propaganda, I think there's possibly a major wrinkle in the debate coming that's going to seriously upset the applecart for the exit campaign. The Scottish are collectively much more pro-EU than the south of England, and the Scottish National Party are in the process of putting together a set of criteria that will trigger another referendum on their own independence from England. I'm fully expecting to see "UK voting to leave the EU" being right at the top of that list of criteria when it's announced, and if there's one thing that is likely to upset the anti-EU crowd more than remaining in the EU it's the very likely prospect of Scotland leaving the UK shortly afterward if they win.

What, you thought the US had the monopoly on turning politics into a car crash TV event?

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

The existing UK laws assume guilty if you do not hand over your key when law enforcement ask for it. It's been like this since the late 1980s.

Re: Sigh

[John Allsup]

People often overlook the issue of verification. If you take a small structured dictionary which takes in, say, 128 bits, and outputs a nonsense poem using the words of the dictionary and some simple rules, you have a reversible procedure for turning 128 bit hashes into literary nonsense. Reverse the procedure and apply a simple procedure to the original 128 bit hash to see if it contains a message. The simple procedure may include things about the sender. The trouble for crackers here, is that there are many such procedures. A simple software example is to append 'Borg' to a message, hash it with shasum, and see if the first two hex digits are f7, say, else discard. Then using evolutionary programs to find a short procedure which generates indices recursively for words in a video file [ with feedback, so the second index requires having the correct video file on hand ]. Guessing a random 128bit passkey is bad enough, but guessing a random procedure is far worse. Having everybody just [ just! ] using aes128 will seem like paradise compared to the output of the computational arms race the UK government is inadvertently about to kick off.

I have fond memories of the old msdos program insults.exe. it has not escaped my attention that one can take a 128 bit number [ possibly the output of a sugared hash ] and use bits from it as indices into tables to generate phrases. There is much fun to be had, and so many variations. The paper from wayback about chaffing and winnowing will perhaps have more attention payed to it.

Re:Sigh

[Viol8]

"Yes, that's why the morons want out."

Yes, imagine that - a nation wanting self determination of its own laws! Radical huh?

Re:Sigh

[AmiMoJo]

It might contravene EU rules on free trade. For example, I use a Swedish VPN service to prevent my internet browsing history and other activity records (metadata) being recorded by my ISP. If this law is to be effective, it would have to make using such services illegal. Otherwise there is little that they can do to force a foreign company to company with UK law.

Maybe there is an issue with trying to ban foreign services for not complying with UK law. For example, they can't ban foreign services because they don't comply with the UK Data Protection Act, as EU free trade is based on the idea that all member states have broadly equivalent protections for such things. As long as the VPN service provider complies with local data retention laws (of which there are none, they only apply to ISPs) I don't think they can legally ban them.

Re:Sigh

[flowerp]

Excuse me, you get ANY desired message by trying all possible one time pads.

The Bible
Hamlet
Andy Weir's The Martian

Re: Sigh

[John Allsup]

Put another way, one limiting factor is the availability of a computational means to verify a correct guess. If the false positive rate is too high, as happens with a OTP, you have problems. Then using encoding schemes rather than just encoding textual data is not hard. If, for example, you only need 2000 different words for your messages, you could start with a basic forth and work thus:

( assume 'append' appends to a word list, and 'say' outputs and clears the word list )
: wHelp S" help" ;
: wThe S" the" ;
: wHomeless S" homeless" ;
: mHelpThe wHelp wThe ;
: mA mHelpThe wHomeless ;
: s1 mA say ;

Now we can map these definitions to 16 bit tokens, padding with random definitions, and store random definitions where the words go to get a non funtioning decode vector. Then to decode, we need a list of words and locations to insert them. One vector of 64k forth words could be used in many ways depending on which words are overwritten and what is put there. The 64k vector need not even contain the api, since we need only overwrite say v[435] with 'say', v[2789] with 'append', put 'S" help"' etc. in the right place and know that v[6789] is a correct code for mA. The secret code is in the modifications necessary, and without both pieces you have nothing. Just the vector and you have a random assortment of words defined in terms of other words.

The issue for GCHQ is not unbreakability, but that the above could be implemented in a few lines of Perl or PHP, and if it becomes widespread by some social media like a computational Twitter on acid, the effort required to search would be prohibitive given the potential for false positives and that most messages are for fun.

The Indiana Pi Law did not get passed, but many equivalently stupid laws have, and this will be yet another. You cannot pass a law requiring that maths magically become easy. Trying to causes collateral damage for no gain. But I guess politicians live in a different universe.

Re:Sigh

[mysidia]

They are breakable if you simply brute-force your way through all possible pad contents

This is equivalent to just brute-forcing all possible plaintexts. If you: have a way to verify that you've found the cleartext message

The method provided for you to verify the message weakened the security of the message.

Re:Sigh

[mysidia]

Untrue. Encryption may be "Information-Theoretically secure".

No real-world encryption usage is information-theoretically secure.

You mention one time pads, but these are typically not used, And they're not really encryption, as in traditional ciphers.... A one time pad is more of a way of dividing information into two equally-sized halves.

For the most part, the Info-Theoretically secure crypto you see would be Quantum cryptography used for low-volume key exchange

Even this cannot be declared unbreakable however --- the possibility exists of exploitability within procedures and software used.

Re:Sigh

[Biolo]

Exactly right. I'm a Scot who voted no at the last referendum, my decision was never in doubt, and I'm fed up with all the calls to repeat the referendum again. This said the UK exiting the EU would make me strongly reconsider my No vote, and I'd probably support having a new referendum whatever my eventual decision on my vote.

Re:Sigh

[Big Hairy Ian]

Also, by definition, no encryption is unbreakable, you just need a few thousand years to crack it.

Not thousands of years! As we've seen from all the encryption technologies that have been invented to date it generally just takes a couple of decades for the tech to upgrade to a point where it's relatively easy to crack. The question is will this all change when Quantum Computers are on every desktop?

Re:Sigh

[aaaaaaargh!]

I'm assuming you're joking, but just in case you're not, allow me to explain.

You cannot brute-force an OTP without the key (or at least strong statistical cues for it), because every plaintext message of the same length is equally likely. If the OTP length is n that includes any part of that length of the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the UK's constitution (if it still has one), and all texts or other messages of length n that have ever been written and will ever be written or transmitted. Likewise, any sequence of length n of the alphabet (e.g. 26 letters, 256 chars, or UTF16) is a valid key, so they cannot "ask" you for the key in any meaningful sense of the word.

Unfortunately, OTPs are of limited value in practice, since they key must be at least as long as the message.

Re:Sigh

[erikkemperman]

The existing UK laws assume guilty if you do not hand over your key when law enforcement ask for it. It's been like this since the late 1980s.

I was wondering about that... Doesn't this kind of prove that this latest offensive against privacy is not aimed at individual investigations, for which cases as you point out they have long had options? So this is about mass-surveillance.

Re:Sigh

[bickerdyke]

You wrong statement is one of the often-repeated untruths about encryption.

Which is true.

But as all these proven unbreakable algorithms require a secure channel to transmit the encryption key. But if you had a reliable secure channel, you wouldn't need any encryption to begin with. You could send the actual data over that secure channel instead.

There is limited use for these when a secure channel is available ahead of time, but even then the storage of the key is vulnerable to attacks. (photographs of the codebook, "rubber hose cryptanalysis", etc)

Not to start with the fact that any system that limits the amount of data that can be securely transmitted (by the size of the previosly exchanged key) and becomes vulnerable as soon as the key is used on one byte more than the keysize, it is not useable on the internet,

So, the original statement would be correct if it included the limitation that all practically usefull encryptions are somehow breakable.

Re:Sigh

[DrXym]

One time pads aren't breakable. Not unless the random data isn't actually random, or because someone reused the same random data to xor more than one message.

Re:Sigh

[TheRaven64]

Maybe London could leave the EU and the UK, and then everyone would be happy.

Re:Sigh

[monkeyzoo]

A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts."

And the result will actually ensure that,... with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the terrorists and criminals can access the content of communications of police and intelligence agencies in order to obstruct police investigations and commit criminal acts."

Lame, technologically ignorant legislators writing laws about technology and security are going to become a real scourge!

Re:Sigh

[ThatsMyNick]

No, you dont understand encryption. If nazis used one time pads, and ended every message with "Hail Hitler", you would still be 0% closer to solving the code. It does not simplify the code breaking. Each and every letter is independent of each other. The encryption key is random.

You dont get a small subset at all. You can literally get anything you want out the code. You want the hamlet, sure you can get it.

Re:Sigh

[Biolo]

Might be the only way to stop the Met Police thinking they have jurisdiction over the entire country. Then again, they seem to think national borders don't apply to them either for "intellectual property" enforcement, so maybe not.

Re:Sigh

[Cow Jones]

No, you get an extremely small subset of the possible original messages.

No, GP is correct. If you can choose the pad contents, you can trivially create any "decrypted" message you like.

As you send more and more messages with the same pad

one time pad

"Hail Hitler". It showed in every single German message

Unlikely. The grammar nazi in charge would have corrected it to "Heil Hitler".

Re:Sigh

[serviscope_minor]

Unlikely. The grammar nazi in charge would have corrected it to "Heil Hitler".

Brilliant! You deserve +5 funny for that.

Re:Sigh

[Jason Levine]

Don't worry. They'll just make it against the law for any hackers to take advantage of the police back doors thus solving the problem forever.

"But..."

FOREVER!!!!

Re:Sigh

[Jason Levine]

I actually like this argument. Sort of turns the "copyright is still a limited time even if it's 120 years long" argument on its head. If waiting 20 years to crack a phone's encryption makes the encryption "unbreakable" then why is a 120 year long copyright "limited"?

Re: Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I have thought about this many times over the years. Evolutionary strategies could lead to some really obscure and bizarre cryptography schemes. Especially if you use real cryptographic algorithms at each layer. Even if not, this is utterly ridiculous. Your example of a poem highlights the greatest injustice of banning encryption - poems can mask layers of meaning even from the author, sometimes for years. It's time to end this whole charade IMHO.

Re:Sigh

[Xest]

Of course it's about mass surveillance, if it was about individual surveillance then they'd just get a warrant to MITM or similar a particular suspects PC exactly like they always have with physical mail and phone calls. They already have the powers to do that type of attack to get a target of a warrant.

They might argue that it's about retaining data so if they come back to someone they can investigate their communications retroactively, but that doesn't explain why they aren't getting all phone calls logged, and all physical mail photocopied and stored. They already can't get historical data of other communication mediums so there's no reason to think they suddenly need it for investigations using digital communications.

So the only thing this possibly can be about is mass surveillance given that they have all the tools they need for individual surveillance already.

Re:Sigh

[gman003]

You are absolutely and completely incorrect.

A one-time pad is an encryption method using a key length as long as the plaintext, never reused. Trying every possible key for a given ciphertext will produce every possible plaintext - literally every possible message with that length.

Even if you knew part of the plaintext, that would only tell you part of the key, and no bit of the key is used for more than one bit of the ciphertext. It tells you nothing you don't already know. The only possible cryptanalysis of a one-time pad is finding a flaw in the means used to generate the key - if it is not truly random, attacks are possible. But properly-implemented one-time pads are literally unbreakable. Only their difficulty of use prevents them from being universally used.

Re: Sigh

[aaarrrgggh]

Two things: security through obscurity... and 2^128 words is about 10^30 English languages.

Re:Sigh

[jcochran]

> Unfortunately, OTPs are of limited value in practice,
> since they key must be at least as long as the message.

So why are they of 'limited value' anyway?

Is it really so hard to exchange a 1TB USB stick with your Mom, whose mail program then uses the random pads from the stick to happily encrypt all the news about her new kitten?

Like seriously...

The reason OTPs are of limited use is because you need to transmit the OTP in a secure fashion. And if you can transmit the key securely, then it's most likely that you could have transmitted the message itself securely eliminating the need for the OTP in the first place.

But yes, OTPs are used when secure transmission is absolutely required. Effectively they "time shift" when the secure transfer is performed. And if the OTP is long enough, it can mean that only 1 secure transfer is needed in order to handle multiple secure message transmissions later.

Re:Sigh

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

China thanks the Home Office. With this proposed law foreign governments can access more easily the content of communications of police, intelligence agencies, and major corporations in the UK in order to commit espionage, both governmental and industrial.

Re:Sigh

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Right... They stopped all those anti-industry, pro-consumer policies like mandatory 2 year warranties, RoHS, strict car emissions standards, WEEE, non-discriminatory pricing, the right to be forgotten, the ban on government support of failing industries etc. Oh, wait...

The mistake you are making there is in thinking that those are "anti-industry, pro-consumer policies". Those policies generally create barriers to entry or hurt specific companies, and therefore are desirable for at least some big and powerful companies or industries with plenty of lobbying powers. In many cases, those policies also don't quite do what they are purported to do.

Re:Sigh

[aaaaaaargh!]

Because the attacker will get the key in the same way as he would obtain the ciphertext. The good thing about ordinary symmetric encryption is that you can generate the key from a memorized passphrase by securely hashing and keystretching it. That's not possible with an OTP.

BTW, your Mom would have a problem, because in order to use an OTP correctly she'd have to immediately destroy her key after encrypting a message about her kittens for you. Only you copy should remain. But you cannot securely erase partial data from a 1 TB USB stick.

Re:Sigh

[MightyMartian]

The only nation I can think of off the top of my head that does not feel itself bound by agreements it has made with other members of the international community is North Korea.

Re:Sigh

[bluefoxlucid]

Any message of the given length s is possible. That mean if you encrypt a 60MB file, it could be 60MB of child pornography MP4 H.264 or 60MB of Rhianna in Ogg Vorbis format an any bitrate. If you pad the file before encrypting, you don't even know the length of the message. Knowing the key lets you get the original data out; not knowing the key means you may be looking at 15MB of classified text documents and 45MB of gibberish.

Re:Sigh

[jcochran]

It's obvious that you're confused about the difference between a one time pad and a cipher. What you're saying is perfectly correct for a cipher. Only the key will give you a meaningful message and therefore you can verify that the key is correct. However, that is not the case for a OTP. For example, here is a simple description of a OTP.

1. Generate a 1 gigabyte file of random bytes using a true random number generator. An example of such a source would be what's generated by Hot Bits using timing intervals of a radioactive source. It's absolutely critical that they be truely random numbers and not something generated by a deterministic algorithm.
2. Copy that file and give the copy to the entity that you wish to communicate with in the future. NOTE: At this point there should be exactly TWO copies of the file. One copy is retained by you and you alone. The other copy is retained by the entity you wish to communicate with in the future.

Now in order to send a message securely to the entity having the copy of the OTP, you create the message. Let's assume that the message is one million bytes long. Just take the 1st one million bytes of the OTP and exclusive or each byte of the message with the corresponding byte of the OTP to create each byte of the message. After you've done that, delete the million bytes of the OTP you've just used so that you'll never use those bytes again.

The receiver of your encrypted message performs the exact same actions with their copy of the OTP. Exclusive or each byte of the encrypted message with the corresponding byte of the OTP to get the original plain text message, then delete those bytes of the OTP that were originally used.

Basically, a message encrypted with an OTP can be ANY message of equivalent length in any language.

Re:Sigh

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Also, by definition, no encryption is unbreakable, you just need a few thousand years to crack it.

Well at somewhere around 270 bit with symmetric key algorithms on conventional computers you run out of available energy in the entire universe or around 540 bits with quantum computers. So at that point I would call it unbreakable. Also there are one time pads which are unbreakable assuming that you have a real random pad and that you do use that pad only once.

Re:Sigh

[101percent]

That isn't too unreasonable. A judge however; "law enforcement" is kind of vague but I don't think you mean a beat cop.

Re:Sigh

[The-Ixian]

I am sure that government entities will be exempt from this law and will be able to use unbreakable encryption...

Re:Sigh

[Bob the Super Hamste]

For anything slightly shorter than this sentence that becomes a task that is computationally impossible before the heat death of universe.

So using that example it is about 138 bytes long and or 1104 bits meaning if a OTP was used it would also have to be 1104 bits long. If one harvest all of the mass energy of the universe it would be around enough energy to cycle a 270 bit counter through all of its states on a conventional theoretical perfect computer, yet we have many orders of magnitude more possible states in our 1104 bit OTP. As there is no benefit to using a quantum computer for cracking a OTP there isn't any benefit to be had as there would with regular symmetric key encryption, bet even if there was it would only allow the cycling of a counter about 540 bits in length which is still many orders of magnitude smaller than our 1104 bit OTP. Finally even with just cycling that 270 bit counter through all of its states we still haven't done any actual decryption or analysis of the cleartext so the actual limit would be somewhat less.

So now to put this in perspective if the state space of the 1104 bit OTP is represented by all of the atoms in the universe, looking at only the first 270 bits of space means statistically we haven't even found one atom in the entire state space to examine to see if that atom is the one state space to even see if it is the one we are looking for. I'll take those odds that it is unbreakable.

Re:Sigh

[swillden]

Untrue. Encryption may be "Information-Theoretically secure". These cannot be broken with just enough computing power. For example, for ordinary text, this is even true for the venerable Enigma if less than 4000 Bits (if I remember things correctly) of ciphertext are available and the key was chosen at random.

This notion is what Shannon called "unicity distance". Assuming arbitrary computing power, so that brute force search of the entire keyspace is perfectly feasibly, unicity distance is the amount of ciphertext required to uniquely determine the key in a ciphertext-only attack. The unicity distance of a cipher is dependent on the details of the cipher and of the plaintext, though there's a notion of minimum unicity distance for a cipher given known plaintext.

I'm not sure what the unicity distances of the various versions of the Enigma machine were. Given that they were improved Hagelin machines, which I've found references claiming had unicity distance of 1000-2000 characters (~5000-10000 bits), I'm pretty sure that 4000 bits is too low, but it's certainly within an order of magnitude.

And, yes, the one-time pad, assuming the pad is unpredictable and uniformly distributed, and is never reused, has no unicity distance (or an infinite unicity distance, depending on how you want to look at it).

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK has never had a written constitution.

And your point being ? The US of A has a written constitution and yet you have the patriot act, secret courts, indefinite detention, institutional torture.

Re:Sigh

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

Fight for your bitcoins!

Re:Sigh

[Yoda222]

As you send more and more messages with the same pad, or if the pads follow any kind of predictable pattern, or god forbid, one of your pads is discovered through other means, the encryption is severely weakened.

Basically you are saying that you can break one-time pad if the system used is not one-time pad.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

No, they are not. Sure, it is easy to come up with a plaintext of the same length (and with all of them if you have unlimited computation power), but the verification whether that is the right one is impossible. That is what makes it secure, you know.

Incidentally, just finding a plaintext of the same length is easy for all ciphers. It is a completely meaningless exercise though and does not compromise security, unless the user was stupid enough to leak data by the length of the message. Some recent SSL vulnerability did that by compressing attacker-delivered data together with other data. If the attacker-delivered data had the same bytes as the secret data, it compressed better, and thereby leaked the secret data.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

No, you have not. Identifying the right plaintext is necessary for breaking the encryption and critically so. After all "Attack at dawn" and "Do not attack!" have the same length, but unless you know which one is the right plaintext, you know exactly nothing except the length of the message.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Unfortunately, OTPs are of limited value in practice, since they key must be at least as long as the message.

For extremely critical messages, they are still practical (think "flash" type embassy traffic). They can also be used to encrypt session keys, dropping the security level to that of the block cipher used.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

That is nonsense. OTPs do not get "transmitted" for exactly the reason you state. They are pre-arranged or in crypto-lingo, they are a Pre-Shared Key. If you need to transmit them, you are already doing it wrong.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Indeed. It is fascinating that people not even understanding the very basics of crypto feel qualified to make such statements. Dunning-Kruger Effect at work, no doubt.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Actually, it could be "hail" in some award English way meaning "hi". Of course, such informality would immediately have you gotten sent to the next KZ.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

That is one reason a good crypto course teaches the notion of "Information Theoretically Secure" and then explains that the TOP is the only one fulfilling that and why that is the case.

Incidentally, there is one exception, where the brute forcing and checking whether it makes sense does not work: If you have a message in the length of one cipher block and the key also is in this length, then you get almost all or all messages that make sense as possible decryption results. You may lose some due to key-collisions for this specific plaintext (same ciphertext-plaintext pair for different key) but not many if the cipher is any good.

Re:Sigh

[Viol8]

I'm not talking about mutual agreements between nations - I'm talking about laws in the UK judicial system, 60% of which are now via the EU. Get a fucking clue.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Actually, there is one possibility. If there is some sort of "decryption magic" in this universe, then they fall. If it is only mathematics, then they are unbreakable. While Mathematics only approximates the real world, no credible signs of any such "magic" has ever been found, so it is safe to say it is not a concern.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Wrong, unless you say there is not true randomness in the world. Current Quantum-Mechanics says there is and it is actually easy to harvest. And OTPs get used (for example, in ultra secret diplomatic communication) and it is a proper cipher.

Incidentally, Quantum Modulation (it is not crypto, really not) is not Information-Theoretically Secure. It is at best Quantum-Theoretically Secure and secure in the real world only if Quantum Theory gets a lot more exactly verified against reality as is possible today.

 

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Even with that limitation, it is still untrue in general. But it would begin to make some sense, because then it would be true in quite a few real-world situations. However then you need to take real-world limits into account: For example, you cannot torture somebody if you cannot get hold of them.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Might have been 4000 chars. Unfortunately I cannot check, this was something the Professor only added on the blackboard and I do not have my notes anymore after 25 years. But the point is because of this effect, even historic cipher technology like the enigma is secure against ciphertext-only attacks if the keys are good and the amount of available ciphertext is limited.

If I remember correctly, the Germans were using code-terms for everything back then and the code-breakers finally had a Spitfire fighter attack a seal colony, because there was no code phrase for "Spitfire beschiesst Robbenbank" (well, obviously, because doing that does not make sense at all ;-) and that gave them one plaintext-ciphertext pair. From that they could figure out how the Germans were keying the Enigma (which was not random at all) and the thing was broken. The whole history is fascinating. If the Germans had keyed the Enigma competently and had not radioed _everything_ in, the war might have gone differently. The world really got lucky there.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

The thing is that OTPs are "arranged" before communication and by entirely different means. Sure, you could call that "transmission", but it does not make much sense to do so. After all, you could call the printing of the pad "transmitting it to the paper" as well. While technically correct, it is not useful to do that.

Re:Sigh

[Cederic]

Yeah, I'm constantly amused that I keep getting asked to comment on information security at work.

My standard response is "here are some risks you need to mitigate, but please get a security professional in because this stuff is hard and I don't know what I'm talking about".

Although, maybe that's why I keep getting asked.

Re:Sigh

[MitchDev]

The government has become the criminals and terrorists...

Kinda rooting for the "criminals and terrorists" that aren't government on this one....

Re:Sigh

[Cederic]

Interesting, but reasonable.

What I find comical is the SNP position that they want self-determination away from the UK but also want to hand all control of economic and politics to the EU.

I'm a Scot that wasn't bloody allowed to vote in the referendum, so fuck the lot of them. Although I did have fun in Edinburgh at the weekend.

Re:Sigh

[Lab Rat Jason]

That made me snort... a literal grammar Nazi.

Re:Sigh

[cfalcon]

I'm glad everyone is shitting on your post.

If you brute force your way through all possible pad contents, then you have brute forced your way through all possible contents of that length.

So if your source document in 300 kilobytes, that's 2400 kilobits, 2457600 bits. You are "brute forcing" your way through 2^(2457600) possibilities. That's truly absurd, because it's every possible state that a 300 kilobyte message could be in. It's every image, in jpg format, that can fit in 300kb. It's every 300kb mp3. It's every 300 kb text file. It's meaningless to say you have decrypted it, because your output state (every possible thing) *isn't based in any way on the input or the key*- it's just a giant set of possibilities- EVERY possibility. You have all the information needed to decrypt my theoretical 300kb message right now, because your technique doesn't care what the input was, or what the pad was, because it generates all possible outputs with literally no way of searching.

It's fucking retarded. Did you find child porn? Yes, all of it. Was just some random numbers? Yup, got that too. How about "all work and no play", repeated for the whole message? Absolutely. As it turns out, the result was all 0s. And also all 1s. Utterly meaningless.

The other piece that shouldn't need to be stated, is that every possible state of that 300kb file is impossible to even talk about. 2^2457600 is shockingly and truly absurd- it's bigger than everything. A universe filled with computronium wouldn't be able to solve that shit in a million universes of time or something.

Anyway, you were either joking, or trolling. Whatever. Here's the takeaway:

A one-time pad is absolutely unbreakable, period. The only challenge is generating a random one time pad (that is, none of the bits of your one time pad are predictable given any other bits of your one time pad, even if your adversary discovers your generation method), and, of course, keeping the one time pad physically secure. If you try to use this to send messages, you also need to ensure that the same one time pad is being on decryption- after all, you can't ever reuse the pad.

Re:Sigh

[Archtech]

"Yes, that's why the morons want out".

So your position is that, since the UK voters are dumb enough to elect rulers who are unscrupulous enough to pass laws like this, the answer is for the UK to be subordinated to an unelected bunch of failed politicians somewhere far away, who will supposedly stand up for the rights of ordinary British people?

And *you* use the word "moron"...

Re:Sigh

[MightyMartian]

As I understand it, Parliament has permitted this EU oversight to happen and further has attempted to integrate EU law into UK law. Is that not the situation as it stands?

Re:Sigh

[tepples]

one time pad

Nonoverlapping substrings of the same one-time pad may be used for different messages. But use of the remainder of a one-time pad does weaken the encryption going forward, as you eventually have to resort to less-than-one-time-pad cryptosystems until such time as more one-time pad material is exchanged.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't think for a second that this is about terrorists and paedophiles. There are enough crypto products for them to choose from already.

It is relatively trivial to write and share unbreakable crypto with pre-shared one time keys/pads which are generated by good random generators. Key/pad distribution is difficult, but if we are talking about small groups of people then in-person key/pad exchange is realistic, so you can establish networks of people with essentially unbreakable 2-way encryption.

Anyone with even the slightest awareness of crypto would know that.

Also it is trivial to write and share unbreakable crypto that masquerades as people transferring a bunch of selfies to one another, so the arguments about making it easier to spot the terrorists because only they will be using crypto are false.

Anyone sufficiently motivated and of above average intelligence can and will use unbreakable crypto to avoid discovery.

Becoming reliant on monitoring of communications to generate investigatory leads will keep the police in steady supply of hapless would-be criminals which looks great on paper, but when it comes to the real insidious threats it is going to take real investigations following the evidence and not just trolling online communications.

I think the greatest concern here is that the police, intelligence services, their bosses and the public get lulled into a false sense that they are effective because the real criminals and real terrorists are throwing easy wins their way as a means of diversion and distraction.

Re:Sigh

[cfalcon]

That's a theoretical situation.

In reality:

1- You must have a good random number generator. Maybe pseudorandom is fine for your needs*, but you might want hardware randomization if you want a real random number.
2- You must physically make the exchange- easy enough, since it's just you and your mom.
3- You must now scramble each message, then UUENCODE the binary. Since you are proficient, this is easy enough- you save your message, run a program that looks up the last index into the file, uses the data there, and then outputs it, and saves the new index into the file. You attach the message. Optionally, you include the offset.
4- Now your mom's software, which could be on her iphone, her android, her Windows PC, or her chromebook or whatever, has to be smart enough to decrypt this message. In order to do this, it needs access to the key, and it needs the offset as an input. If you always send messages in order or have that information in the header or the message plaintext, then this works just fine assuming you automate it. But how did you automate this? You must proactively modify either every email program your mom uses, to special case your message, train her in some offline utility that processes the XORed data, or insist she use a specific email program to get your email.
5- Your communications are safe as long as both copies of the one time pad are safe.

Now, does this SOUND easy? If you think it is, consider all the burdens you place on yourself and your mom. You have to write at least one utility, and likely you will need one utility on your box, and one or two remote programs or scripts. Your mom has to be using the right type of receiver, and she has to be able to get that terabyte stick of data wherever she wants to get data from you. Additionally, if she loses the stick, all your communications are subject to being scooped by an adversary that retrieves the stick, and of course she can't get any encrypted data until then. This assumes that you solve the problem of passing the index explicitly (put it in cleartext) or implicitly (every message in order determines the index).

*Finally, we come to the issue- in this case, by using "your mom" as an example, you trivialize some pieces of this- notably, any method of making this secure could be hand waved away by the reader as unneeded for discussing how the baby is doing or whatever.

In practice, if you want to communicate with your mom securely, you are best using some encrypted email site like tutanota.com, which actually has the ability to be used from many places, including her phone. I'd argue it would even be easier to exchange very small (FAT16 or whatever) formatted veracrypt drive files, with a prearranged symmetric password.

Re:Sigh

[fustakrakich]

What, you thought the US had the monopoly on turning politics into a car crash TV event?

BAH! The Europeans can turn politics into world war...

Re:Sigh

[cfalcon]

In the one time pad case, we know for a fact that there's no way to be sure you've found the cleartext.

For instance, assume that every message sent from Alice to Bob begins with:

Hello Bob, You Scoundrel!!

And you have a message that is XORed with a one time pad, and contains data equal to the length of that salutation, plus 10 bytes.

What's in the 10 bytes? No one can ever know. If you were to generate all possible plaintexts of that length (a huge number), and you were to throw away all the ones that don't begin with "Hello Bob, You Scoundrel!!", you will be left with a message set equal to all the possible permutations of 10 bytes. You'll also know what the one time pad said over the bytes that were XORed with "Hello Bob, You Scoundrel!!", but because those bytes are utterly and completely unrelated to any other byte in the ciphertext, this is useless information. If it was related to it in some way, it wouldn't be a one time pad- it would be some other thing, where this known plaintext attack could help.

One time pads will never provide a way to verify that you have found the cleartext message.

Re:Sigh

[cfalcon]

Right, but when you talk to the cryptowizard and he casts his spell, you have two problems.

1- His spell is ultimately reversing entropy to get at the original data somehow. Maybe it sees back in time and space or whatever. If your wizard can do that, he doesn't need the plaintext really, because he's pulling data equal to the length of the plaintext from the ether. It's possible that the spell needs the plaintext for some magical reason, but it's not in any way based on the contents of the plaintext. Importantly, this wizard can pull data from the past and bring it unaltered to the future- you obviously can't hide any information from him in any way whatsoever. The one time pad is as safe as any other method when your opponent has demigod level powers over time.

2- The cryptowizard's spell produces a plaintext and a key out of the ciphertext. But I could do that too- I just choose what I want the plaintext to be, XOR it with the ciphertext, and present both the plaintext (that I made up) and the key (that is generated from that). Unless cryptomancy is so well trusted that it is believed by all that his spell went back through time versus just stamping some incriminating text onto a page, you have the same problem- how do you trust that out of all nearly infinite source plaintexts, that THIS is the one that is trusted? Now you gotta vet the wizard, and the spell, with some kind of enchantment review process. Even if the wizard can grab the data from the past with his spell, how do you trust that? You can't verify it through mundane means.

Re:Sigh

[Zocalo]

Yeah, there's a lot of irony in that, but it's par for the course and with good reason. Just about all the regions of the EU that are seeking independence from their parent state also intend to submit themselves for EU membership as well should they succeed, and there are a lot of them, albeit most seem unlikely to achieve autonomy. Ultimately the EU affords more independence over many local political and administrative matters than many national governments are prepared to afford their provinces, despite what UKIP and the like would like people to believe, so it's not as daft as it seems.

Re:Sigh

[swillden]

Yeah, Kahn's Codebreakers covers this in some detail. The allies actually did a lot of things to generate cribs (bits of known plaintext). Cool stuff.

Re:Sigh

[david_thornley]

If you're talking about brute force, no, that's not going to happen. It's not possible to test 2^128 possible keys using only the resources of the Solar System, and I consider that impractical. Assuming we develop quantum computers of the appropriate power (and I'm not convinced we can), they effectively cut the key size in half, so AES-256 could not be brute-forced without becoming something more than a Type II civilization.

The alternatives are breaking the cipher, which is not considered likely for modern ciphers like the AES variants (IIRC, DES became vulnerable to brute force, and hasn't been broken), or finding implementation problems. I suppose I should note that most ciphers are not proven to be NP-hard, and it's possible that P=NP, which means there might be a polynomial-time cipher breaker, but that's not considered likely (and the polynomial time might turn out to be just as impractical).

Re:Sigh

[Cederic]

Hmm. There was me cynically thinking it was the lure of EU handouts.

Re:Sigh

[ale2011]

MEPs seem to be almost 50-50. By comparison:

By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decided to call on EU member states to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender".

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

>The industry lobbyists (extremely influential in Brussels)

If you think lobbyists are extremely influential in Brussels what do think about lobbyists at national level. Most crazy shit is blocked by EU, most crazy shit is push by countries. The EP or CJEU are far too often the last bastion against national extremist crap.

Re:Sigh

[Krishnoid]

Then you'll probably get a chuckle out of this as well.

Re:Sigh

[Darinbob]

We had a discussion of this topic at the latest tautology club meeting.

Re:Sigh

[CrimsonAvenger]

Let's assume that the message is one million bytes long. Just take the 1st one million bytes of the OTP and exclusive or each byte of the message with the corresponding byte of the OTP to create each byte of the message.

Note that better practice is to always send the same length of message. Don't give them anything to work with, since just the amount of info you're sending back and forth is useful to the enemy if known.

And if you really want to be an ass, send random bytes containing no info whatsoever once in a while, just to screw with their heads....

Re: Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, we now we now know the genesis of Vogon poetry. Just don't make the interpreter program self aware, or it'll harikari itself all over your motherboard.

Re:Sigh

[mark-t]

It is relatively trivial to write and share unbreakable crypto with pre-shared one time keys/pads which are generated by good random generators. Key/pad distribution is difficult, but if we are talking about small groups of people then in-person key/pad exchange is realistic, so you can establish networks of people with essentially unbreakable 2-way encryption.

As an OTP must necessarily be just as long as the message that you encrypt with it, if you are exchanging data in-person anyways, why not just exchange the message instead of the OTP?

Re:Sigh

[nehumanuscrede]

There is also no guarantee the remaining 10 bytes contains anything meaningful.

Those who utilize one time pad systems will typically fill parts or even most of a message with nulls.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Of course, the magic does not have any problems here. That is why it is called "magic".

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Or arrange for real cover-traffic: Send a message of exactly the same length every hour (or what you need) and send nothing else, ever. That does not even tell them whether you are communicating. SigInt is a lot about just finding communication patterns even when there is zero information about the contents.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Incidentally, the Russians did that in WWII because they ran out of paper for new pads. As soon as two messages encrypted with the same pad are intercepted, decryption gets very easy.

Re:Sigh

[gweihir]

Using a CPRNG for production of keys in the length of the message and then XORing that to the message is called a "stream cipher". The actual key is the CPRNG initialization. For example, OFB mode for block-ciphers works that way. This is not a one-time pad at all, for that the key needs to be true random, not faked random.

Re:Sigh

[Viol8]

Yes - the former idiot Labour administration are responsible for it though the current incumbents don't seem in a hurry to do much about it either. Hence the out campaign.

Re:Sigh

[jeremyp]

I'm the new British ambassador for the People's Republic of China. Before I leave, I go to my boss who hands me a USB stick containing a couple of terabytes of one time key. I use it to encrypt my messages home while in China and when it runs out, I pop home for a "holiday" and to get a new USB stick.

The premise "if you can transmit the key securely, then it's most likely that you could have transmitted the message itself securely" is false in general.

Re:Sigh

[jeremyp]

Pedantic: Actually the UK does have a written constitution, it's just not written down all in one place.

Re:Sigh

[mysidia]

And you have a message that is XORed with a one time pad, and contains data equal to the length of that salutation, plus 10 bytes.

"One Time Pad" is not a specific software implementation such as GPG or AES256. One time pads require at least as many securely random bits as data bits; sometimes, real-world random number generators are used that don't have securely random output, sometimes "One-Time" pad bits are recycled, when the sender runs out of them, which compromises the unbreakableness.
In practice, the sender/recipient's system will provide the recipient a way of verifying that the entire message is intact and correct; such as by sending a digital signature or message digest, e.g. SHA256 of the plaintext; if an arbitrary plaintext can be checked against the check code, without having to successfully decrypt anything, then possible guesses can be made at the message.

Re:Sigh

[jeremyp]

How do you do that? I brute forced a seventeen character message encrypted with a one time pad and here are three of the possible plain texts I got out.

wearenowattacking
wearenotattacking
rmseatstoecheeses

Which is the right one?

Re:Sigh

[cfalcon]

If your implementation insists on leaking extra data, then sure, it isn't a one time pad anymore. In this example, to ensure that the message is intact and correct, why not send a SHA256 of... THE CIPHERTEXT!

One time pads requiring at least as many random bits as data bits is, of course, the point. Nothing in my post says otherwise- in fact, it relies on it.

If a one time pad is reused, then it is not a one time pad. It's even in the fucking name. Now it's a long XOR cipher, and is substantially compromised.

One time pads are completely secure. Things that look like they might be one time pads but instead leak plaintext information are not one time pads.

Re:Sigh

[cfalcon]

The point is that the magic still has problems *even when it works as described*, and that a magic spell that does that is functionally equivalent to "what was going on when this message was encrypted"- it is the power to place a camera in the past and transmit that data to you now. And my overall conclusion is, this takes it out of the realm of cryptography completely- the magic decryption spell is really a time-scrying spell, and therefore not a crypto attack at all- it's a surveillance / security type attack. It's like claiming that Veracrypt is broken because you can keylog the guy entering the password.

Re:Sigh

[lucien86]

Yes but the UK government already work for the Chinese don't they? or for any foreign buyer with enough money to oil the wheels..They certainly don't seem to work for the British people.. Sigh!!!

Re:Sigh

[lsatenstein]

If there was a massive bank fraud, would the government make good on it?

Re:Sigh

[lucien86]

"Also, by definition, no encryption is unbreakable, you just need a few thousand years to crack it."

Just not true. In fact with enough knowledge and the right setup completely unbreakable crypto is relatively simple.. Basic multi-channel multiplexing encryption algorithm + redundancy remover + recursion + noise injection + a long enough key.
The really difficult part is online crypto where you have to share public keys and other parties have complete public access to the full algorithm.

The total password in the system I am working on is 2 megabytes + long and generated by a non-pseudo random number generator, it also uses strong hardware level defences because that's the main real vulnerable point. This encryption is intended to protect Strong AI systems such as autonomous cars or aircraft, and so is life-critical.

Re:Sigh

[ThatsMyNick]

Russians also used humans pressing random keys on typewriters all day long to generate number pads. Humans dont do randomness well, and there were plenty of patterns for American cryptanalysts to exploit. Good stuff.

Who will oversee this?

[houghi]

I am sure the ones to oversee this is the Ministry of Truth.

Re:Who will oversee this?

[AHuxley]

A Cyber Supremo.
("The Bed of Nails", Yes Minister)

Re: Who will oversee this?

[Falconhell]

No, supremo is correct as a reference from Yes Minister.. Although the real title in private was cyber muggins. :)

Re:Who will oversee this?

[arglebargle_xiv]

They also got the translation wrong in the original article, "Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit" is translated as Ministry for State Security, not Ministry for Internet Safety and Security as the article calls it.

All encryotions is "breakable"

[Anonymous Coward]

it just might take a while ...

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[serviscope_minor]

It's simply 100% mathematically wrong.

One time pad is information theoretic secure. It is impossible to break.

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[Sique]

As someone pointed out already, OTP is not really an encryption, but a way to split the information in half.

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[Bob the Super Hamste]

You're not thinking on the correct scales even.

You need to be thinking on the scale of the heat death of the universe and total mass energy of the universe. At those scales it is still possible using even quantum computers to have unbreakable encryption. This actually happens at surprisingly low key lengths. For symmetric key encryption around 540 bits will protect against attacks even from ideal quantum computers (well beyond tomorrow's technology or even the next millennium's technology) harvesting all of the energy in the universe. I don't have to pretend to know about tomorrows technology to know that things are secure once the state space is so huge that it cannot be explored even by using theoretically perfect devices using all of the energy available matter, or time in the universe I can feel secure knowing that my data is actually secure.

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[Walking The Walk]

As someone pointed out already, OTP is not really an encryption, but a way to split the information in half.

No, OTP is symmetric encryption where the pad is the key. You take your plaintext, transform it with the pad, and that becomes your ciphertext. Then you apply the same transformation with the same pad to the ciphertext, and the result is the original plaintext. The information to be sent should not be used for any part of the pad.

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[Kjella]

Only because you arbitrarily assign one half to be the ciphertext and the other the key, you could swap them and the result would be the same. Or maybe an even better example make one input column and two output columns, toss a coin and put the bit left if it's heads and right if it's tails. Clearly you've now split half the information in each, right? Now just fill out the blanks with XOR and you have your chiphertext or pad or whatever you choose to call it. Sure, it fits the formal definition of encryption but not the practical analogy of a box with lock and key, more like a dollar bill cut in half that's not worth anything without the other half.

For the most part it's just as difficult to send both halves as one whole, the primary use case is if you can easily pass half securely up front but not later, like a nuclear submarine going out to sea. That's nice but sort of a niche use, as opposed to sending the data online or by mail and the key via PKI, over the phone or some other quasi-secure but very low bandwidth channel. Functionally it's very much like you need to get the same volume across with half the information density.

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[Dr_Barnowl]

Pads become worthless once the entire entropy field has been mapped

Pseudo-scientific twaddle. The "rainbow table" you're talking about is not only infinite in size, by it's nature it also contains every possible plaintext message of any given length. Which means that you could just claim that the message was whatever you wanted it to be, within the size limit.

Who knows? Maybe this is what they'll claim they've done in the future to string up dissidents. But not until they've lobotomised a large swathe of the population.

Re:All encryotions is "breakable"

[Walking The Walk]

Only because you arbitrarily assign one half to be the ciphertext and the other the key, you could swap them and the result would be the same.

No. Then you would be sending your message in the clear and encrypting the pad. The point of OTP is that you can pre-share the pad, then later use it to exchange messages without the message being read by intercepting parties.

For the most part it's just as difficult to send both halves as one whole

You don't send them as a whole. You pre-share the pad (eg: tell your friend to use the prime-numbered pages of a specific edition of the bible), then you can freely send messages you've encrypted using that pad, up until the point when you've used up the pad.

So, no one time pad

[ThatsMyNick]

Everything else goes, right?

Re:So, no one time pad

[AHuxley]

Ban entering or exiting the UK with paper, pens, maths books with crypto chapters on one time pads and big books.
Any holiday or sabbaticals could be cover for a face to face meeting to set up a one time pad system with near unlimited key material.
Years of messages could get total privacy after just one rendezvous.

Re:So, no one time pad

[monkeyzoo]

That would be pretty good legal theory to try out. :)
I guess it depends how the law is actually written; it's probably not as simplistic as the summary here. But if it really says "unbreakable encryption" then you could have a field day with expert witnesses explaining that all these soon-to-be illegal encryption schemes are all breakable (if you are Methuselah; ;-) ).

Tools of oppression

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace "terrorists, paedophiles and criminals" with "people" and you get what this is really about: People must not be allowed a “safe space” online. Nobody wants that, except the rich elite in their mad power grab towards global tyranny.

Re:Tools of oppression

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace "terrorists, paedophiles and criminals" with "people" and you get what this is really about:
People must not be allowed a “safe space” online.
Nobody wants that, except the rich elite in their mad power grab towards global tyranny.

I hope the rich elite enjoy their doxxing then. Remember no one is safe online.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone should be aware that the majority of paedophile rings that have been busted were found to be passing material amongst themselves by sending encrypted DVDs (and originally VHS tapes and photographs etc.) using services such as USPS/Royal Mail signed for etc. Physical mail can't be interfered with without a court order, is secure, cheap and reliable. I would imagine terrorists do much the same.

This is plain and simply the gubberment desperately trying to keep all windows of the Panopticon open. Clueless old 19th century minds trying to legislate against the future and maintain their failed baboon style pyramid hierarchy.

It will be a total failure.

Re:Bullshit

[AmiMoJo]

Most of that stuff seems to happen on Tor anyway, which being an open source US based project won't be affected by these rules anyway.

Re:Bullshit

[DrXym]

More to the point, most terrorists, paedophiles and assorted other lawbreakers aren't computer geniuses. Even if they think they're practicing good security, chances are they're still making mistakes - their pattern of activity, the sites they frequent, the software they use, the people they converse with, their nuances of grammar and spelling. All things that can be exploited to find out who they are. Even computer hacking groups get busted from being careless - it only takes one slip-up and game over.

And that's the people who are practicing good security. Probably the majority of paedos and other evildoers are idiots who leave clues all over the place and given the nature of their crimes, the police / security services are sufficiently motivated to go after them.

As for the UK's laws, it's frankly preposterous and hopefully it fails because it is basically unenforceable.

Re:Bullshit

[fafalone]

Physical mail can't be interfered with without a court order, is secure, cheap and reliable.

A "court order" means a rubber stamp when an inspector wants a peek. If you're a target, they'll find something suspicious about your package for sure. "The drug/bomb dog alerted." = indisputable probable cause for search to the courts; if it's just a DVD, well, someone obviously did coke off it once. International mail is the worst. There's actually a long list of qualifiers for a suspicious item that can be used to justify a search. What's even worse, they're true pros and opening and re-sealing without leaving evidence, so the only time you even find out is if they seize and send you a notice (love letter), or kick in your door, shoot your pets, and order to the ground with an automatic weapon anyone old enough to stand- shortly after you receive it.
So while if you're not being investigated, you can send (or receive; but they can get a warrant for all mail FROM a suspicious address) non-drug items without worrying about searches, the moment they're actually interested in your mail all the inspections and weak grounds for probable cause we allowed in the name of stopping drugs-via-mail or explosives-via-mail will almost certainly turn something up that lets them open it. The fact they need a judge to rubber stamp their probable cause warrant isn't much protection.

And this is in the US, where we allegedly still have some rights. The situation in the UK is almost certainly worse.

Re:Bullshit

[brantondaveperson]

As for the UK's laws, it's frankly preposterous and hopefully it fails because it is basically unenforceable.

So's drug prohibition. I mean, you can't even keep drugs out of prisons, and you pay people to walk around them the whole time. Hasn't stopped them spending billions on it though. If they make crypto illegal, then possessing crypto software becomes an offence, and they'll bang you up if they find it. Simple. Won't stop people using it, but that doesn't mean it won't pass into law.

Re:Bullshit

[havana9]

In Sicily there's the mafia, the real one that kills people, cops and judges. To communicate with each orter, especially the fugitives are the pizzini, small handwritten or typewritten letters exchanged using dead letter boxes.
This make difficult to know even if a communication is taking place and who are the sender and the recipient, especially if the mailbox is in in the countryside, where is difficult to conceal a CCTV system.

Revolt

[bill_mcgonigle]

This gives Apple and Google the power to decide whether or not there will be a revolt in the UK.

I'm not sure the politicians have thought this one through all the way. But, good, from a meritocracy perspective.

Re: Revolt

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be interesting if Google, Apple et al suddenly suspend service and sales in the UK. I wonder what the electorate would say.

Re: Revolt

[Midnight Thunder]

It will be interesting if Google, Apple et al suddenly suspend service and sales in the UK. I wonder what the electorate would say.

Or maybe the British government will mandate that they can't cut them off? This would be reminiscent of when the Spanish government tried forcing Google to keep indexing the newspapers, when they had decided that Google was to compensate the papers for indexing them!? Maybe we need to have a hall of shame for "stupid tech laws passed by governments"?

Re:Revolt

[delt0r]

The politicians are clearly totally clueless on the topic. However a few hacked email accounts or wifi routers and some juicy scandals centered around them, and they may just start figuring it out.

Re: Revolt

[Zobeid]

or else. . . Put the required backdoor in the software for UK customers, then every time they start to use it pop up a warning: "As required by law, this device is not secure! Do not enter any message that you don't wish to be read by the UK government, the USA, China, or the Russian mob."

Let's see how that goes over.

Re: Revolt

[bill_mcgonigle]

> G+A will have a year or so to modify their service, or will withdraw certain services from the UK and competitors will step in.

It's not that simple. Overnight there will be no sync services, no updates, no app stores - Google and Apple both know that if they cave to the UK they lose the rest of the world like dominos - they cannot afford to keep the UK business.

It's not like every user will be buying a Windows phone over that year - in fact Google and Apple would be stupid to announce non-appeasement ahead of time and cede the business to MS. Instead there will be millions of people supremely pissed off at the Parliament when the day comes. Don't be there on November fifth. Don't take away the circuses if you value your power.

Re:Revolt

[DigiShaman]

I'm not sure the politicians have thought this one through all the way.

OH YES THEY HAVE!!!! This is a deliberate power grab! And they will push on the social hot button issues to whatever end to achieve the goal of control. This was never about you, it was always about power for them!

One thing has become apparent as I get older; either a cooperation/industry will buy out elected officials, or the elected officials will pull the rug out underneath said corporation/industry. It's always been a political war between those that have power and wealth. You, the little people, are just refugees caught in the cross-fire. In the end nothing new is happening; only difference is the organizational constructs at play.

Re: Revolt

[Jahta]

It will be interesting if Google, Apple et al suddenly suspend service and sales in the UK. I wonder what the electorate would say.

Or maybe the British government will mandate that they can't cut them off? This would be reminiscent of when the Spanish government tried forcing Google to keep indexing the newspapers, when they had decided that Google was to compensate the papers for indexing them!? Maybe we need to have a hall of shame for "stupid tech laws passed by governments"?

You can't force international companies to offer services in your country. Remember when the British music industry body (BPI) tried to shake down YouTube for royalties? YouTube just blocked all traffic from British domains and the BPI backed down swiftly.

Cameron may think that he can dictate to multinational companies and legislate for the world. But obviously he cannot. Apple and Google may not pull out of the UK entirely, but they are not going to break their own products just for one market either. They will probably publicly say that they cannot offer some services (or have to offer watered down versions) in the UK due to new legislation. Cue massive revolt from iPhone, Android, Gmail, etc. users. Then Cameron will back down, blaming American companies (and the pesky US constitution which actually guarantees ordinary people rights) for not being able to implement the ban.

Re: Revolt

[phayes]

Google and Apple both know that if they cave to the UK they lose the rest of the world

No. G/A need merely provide a security deficient version of their products for the UK. Actually getting people to use it instead of the secure version is a can of worms that the prime minister has yet to open.

Re:Revolt

[KitsuneSoftware]

Withdraw services such as "Diffie–Hellman key exchange" from products such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari? I don't call myself a security person, never mind expert, so I don't know: could MS/Google/Apple retroactively decrypt HTTPS connections made by the web browsers they supply?

Re: Revolt

[CanadianMacFan]

If they provide a security deficient version of their products for the UK then every other government will demand to have the same thing and we'll all be forced to be running them or use old phones without updates. Google and Apple need to stand up to this draconian law.

Re:Revolt

[fustakrakich]

Terrorists and pedos, rare as they are, will continue using other products.

That alone is suspicious and will attract attention.

Re: Revolt

[phayes]

That the UKG can force A/G to make a diminished security product available is clear. That they can force everyone to use it is not.

Re: Revolt

[david_thornley]

Correction: the UK government can refuse to allow Apple and Google to sell certain products in the UK. They can't force Apple and/or Google to provide an insecure version. Both Apple and Google are large and secure enough to lose the UK market temporarily.

Re:Revolt

[Dr_Barnowl]

Most UK ISPs run a transparent web proxy ; the government could compel root CAs to provide a copy of their private keys so they they can dynamically sign man-in-the-middle certificates on those proxies. Of course that will lead to the keys inevitably being leaked and the collapse of internet commerce as we know it, but hey, something better will arise in it's place.

Re: Revolt

[CanadianMacFan]

And nothing stopping UK residents from popping over the channel and buying a phone over there. All phones need to have a common charger in Europe. Unless the UK government forces manufactures to mark the phones as made for sale in the UK, like Canada does with the CA Number for textile fibre products, then there's no way to tell where a phone came from.

Re: Revolt

[phayes]

Correction? No, just wishful thinking on your part. Apple, like all companies is driven by profit and will not cut off it's nose (abandon UK sales) to spite it's face (be forced to propose a security compromised version in the UK). Again, the biggest problem for the UKG will probably be in forcing people to use the security compromised version. What are they going to do, force people to "upgrade" on planes/boats/trains coming into the UK?

Re: Revolt

[david_thornley]

Google pulled out of China for at least a while, and Apple and Google may think it better long-term to not cave in here. If it's illegal to sell iPhones and Androids in the UK, there's going to be a LOT of popular protest, so it won't last long. If they do cave, almost every other government will want to mandate the security-deficient ones.

Re: Revolt

[phayes]

Yes, we all see that you want to make the change seem as catastrophic as possible to make people think that it is impossible to contemplate but that does not make it so.

This is not Censorship+Google/China, this is Browser choice+Microsoft/EU. Microsoft did not pull out of the EU after the EU forced them to present a browser choice at first login. They litigated and implemented the least onerous solution.

Google did not pull out of China because they wanted a diminished security version of android but because because the Chinese govt wanted Google to perform the censorship for them. Google would have needed to implement massive changes to perform the Chinese censorship because they were not architectured to be able to be filter as the Chinese were demanding.

Adding a back door to android/iOS and giving the key to the UKG is a tiny change in comparison & there is no way that A/G would pull out & abandon the hundreds of millions of pounds they make every year should the UKG force them to compromise security. No, like Microsoft they will litigate & if forced to will implement as little as they can.

And again, similarly to Microsoft/EU, the non-standard version will have little uptake and will be abandoned after a few years. Try coming up with a scenario on how the UKG would be able to stop people from using the normal strong crypo versions of android/iOS.

Insecure WiFi for everyone!

[UberVegeta]

There was a Slashdot poll a few years ago, asking the question "What percentage of your traffic is encrypted?"

The answer that stuck in my mind was from a guy who said, "all of it. My WiFi has WPA2."

No unbreakable Encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically, no encryption at all, since if it's breakable by one person it's breakable by anyone.

How little they understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption is only one way mathematical difficulty can be harnessed. There are others. Encryption is great for making large amounts of data unreadable in a way which is independent of the data. But procedures can be learned by rote, and executed in a human brain before deciding whether and how to interact with a machine. By compromising encryption, the government will stimulate criminals to both probe the detection network with false information, and to develop methods of using whatever legal encrypted communication exists so that messages go unnoticed. If two people agree a convention, such as using two spaces rather than one in a tweet, padding a 130 char tweet to 140, and have a mentally computable way of indicating whether the content has special meaning, and a dictionary of codewords, we are back where we were before the second world war, with cryptic crossword techniques being used. One shot conventions [ consider if I say that when I send messages on Twitter if you append 'FluffyBunny', md5sum the result, and then treat specially if the first three hex digits are 3f4, whilst trivially breakable if you know the scheme, and who will transmit with it, if you don't, brute force will swamp you with false positives, and what if this convention is only used once between people ]. Just as antibiotic use has bred superbugs, this action by the UK government has the potential to set off an evolutionary arms race, where many terrorists will be caught, but those who are not will have by chance have developed means of secrecy beyond the security services. Passing laws declaring the existence of unicorns, or banning gravity from acting, are foolish. We have, in digital technology, an enviroment which we as humans must adapt to, not try to adapt it to us. Laws like this do the latter, but such attempts will eventually succumb to the problems of computational inefficiency.

Re:How little they understand

[fustakrakich]

Passing laws like this is to produce a compliant public. The details of encryption fly way over their heads. Terrorism, as a profession and business, will not be affected. They can operate in broad daylight, and the *dog won't bark*.

The VPN test

[AHuxley]

A brand outside the UK and 5 eye nations offers an openvpn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... file to user in the UK ensuring a less easy to log internet connection.
That hop is from within a domestic like network after the providers "modem" like product.
Will the UK ban, track, investigate and demand credit card payments to VPN providers be blocked in the UK?
With "no plans to ban encryption services" that will be very cheap and simple way around the most simple provider level logging.
Why is the UK not interested in the networking solution thats a way out of the UK thats simple and cheap?
"Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security" http://www.theguardian.com/wor... (6 September 2013)
Did Cheesy Name and Tempora advance to a level that the UK feels confident to trace the entry and exit of any VPN service?
Re 'a duty on companies to be able to access their customer data in law" will be interesting for any UK brand offering services. Who gets the keys and when can government officials make the request? The term "prevent criminal acts" sounds like realtime and collect it all even with any oversight.

Two things come to mind

[MikeRT]

If they bend the knee and make country-specific images for the UK, it's over for them. Every country will expect them to be able to do a custom build for them too. The other is that we need the federal government to take an openly nationalist position such things. If you ban our legal products from your country for stuff like this, we'll ban yours without a hesitation. For the UK, that would mean the feds could tell Google and Apple to blacklist all apps produced by UK-based corporations from their stores; for China their handsets from vendors like ZTE couldn't be legally sold here.

Re:Two things come to mind

[AHuxley]

The US almost faced that tricky export market when pushing for early CALEA like access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Did the world need to create systems just for the US at an extra cost? Did US brands have to make expensive products for the US and retool for export markets without trap doors, back doors?
Every system got the back doors and trap doors as not to pass on costs or lock out law enforcement. No retooling, no dual designs needed.
This more a legal change. Every UK ready product will have its electronic surveillance layer on by default as shipped out of a factory rather that activated per user later depending on a nations needs/laws.

Oh noes, where will I get my encryption from?

[wonkey_monkey]

Internet Firms To Be Banned From Offering Unbreakable Encryption Under New UK Laws

The reasons given are that they don't want the likes of terrorists and paedophiles to communicate in places the Police can't reach.

Then in the great British tradition, they'll just Do It (Y)Themselves. It's not like "internet firms" - whatever that means - have a monopoly on mathematics.

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

Free WiFi for everybody [[[who knows how to get it]]] in the UK!

Bye-bye, UK

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Both companies should just cease all official product sales and support in the UK. Neither company should be forced to make multiple products just because the UK demands this, but to be compliant that's exactly what they will have to do. There will be a "UK Model" IPhone, with pre broken encryption all ready to go. Of course this will horribly backfire once criminal ID theft people start exploiting this purposely weakened software. And no real criminals or terrorists will use any of these pre-cracked systems anyway, so the UK's main thrust here will do nothing but enable more ID theft. Good job, UK!

Re:Bye-bye, UK

[Anonymous Coward]

>And no real criminals or terrorists will use any of these pre-cracked systems anyway,

Of course. They will simply order a secured model from abroad.
So what comes next? Opening parcels and tracking people who order 'illegal' technology?

And probably the workaround will be even easier than that. Since the weaken encryption will for sure be only software-level, the only thing you will have to do will be to flash your phone with a secure software, like Cyanogen.

Politicians are imbeciles.

Re:Bye-bye, UK

[ale2011]

Does that mean. if you're a foreigner, you cannot bring your phone or laptop with you whenever you travel to UK?

Re:Bye-bye, UK

[91degrees]

Yes. Of course they should lose billions of pounds worth of revenue in order to protest a silly law.

Or they could say why it's not going to work during the consultation phase.

Of course all this assumes that the Telegraph's information is remotely accurate.

Re:Bye-bye, UK

[RockDoctor]

Does that mean. if you're a foreigner, you cannot bring your phone or laptop with you whenever you travel to UK?

Regardless of whether you're a foreigner or a Briton, the (encrypted) device in question would be contraband if you attempted to import it into the UK. This is exactly the same as if you were to buy something legal in the country you buy it in (a lock-knife; a gun; or an encrypted telephone) and attempt to import it into the UK, then you are committing an offence. As such you'd be liable to arrest and or deportation (at your own cost).

It doesn't matter if you're a Briton, or a foreigner, and whether or not the device belongs to you, your boss, or a "friend", if it is in your possession [*], and it is contraband [**], then it is your responsibility.

Notes : [*] this includes shipping agents for people like DHL I was working with one such last month. this is why they can seem like picky fuckers about the paperwork for shipping something.

[**] The Police, Border Force, and ultimately the courts will determine if something is contraband. It is your responsibility as an importer (personal, or through working for DHL or whoever) to find out what currently is or isn't contraband and to abide by that. (For example (see above) in many mainland Europe countries it is legal to possess a bladed tool or weapon with a folding blade which is held in the open position by a catch - a "lock knife" - which in Britain it is not legal to own or carry. If you don't know this, then you have a problem if you bring one in, either in your baggage or a pocket. Even if you come in by boat or train, or private plane and don't go through the normal security theatre.)

The law is written to be simple to enforce, not simple to comply with or to defend yourself against.

Re:Bye-bye, UK

[DigiShaman]

Um no. The US will quickly draft and mandate all phones be PRISM compliment shortly there after. And in fact, might even have a global treaty put forth which will mandate all technology companies create a Government API. Each Government given their own key access to phones registered in their nations. Google and Apple will go along with it because now they have a platform to make such mandates manageable.

This WILL HAPPEN!

Re: Bye-bye, UK

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been illegal from quite some time to own or operate a brain in the UK... This shouldn't be a surprise.

Re:Bye-bye, UK

[The-Ixian]

Just make the encryption system user opt-in... most users will stick with a default (unencrypted) configuration.... I am sure that authorities would have no problem with this compromise....

Re: Bye-bye, UK

[RockDoctor]

Above a certain MIPS rating of "brain", yes.

If unbreakable encryption is outlawed...

[mwvdlee]

If unbreakable encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use unbreakable encryption.

Strong (not to say "unbreakable") encryption is out there. It will be used. The question is whether you want it to be a weapon used by all or only against you.

Encouraging people to use TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently it is fair to say 50% of people using TOR have something illegal to hide. The other 50% being paranoid.

But with such legislation they are pushing typical users to install TOR. And soon 99.9% of TOR traffic will be casual Internet browsing, yet undistinguishable from the 0.01% of illegal activity. Making TOR even a 'safer place' for 'terrorists, paedophiles and criminals'.

Congratulations politicians, you have yet again proven yourself complete idiots. Time to hang yourself. And I mean it. Or we will hang you.

Re:I think they need to decide

[Dog-Cow]

Ah, the no-true-encryption fallacy.

All encryption is breakable, given enough time. Conversely, ROT-13 is encryption, even if it's rather poor.

terrorists and paedophiles

[Errol backfiring]

So, if you are a terrorist or a paedophile, join the police. That is the only safe place for you. As a plus, you get enterprise grade access to other terrorists and paedophiles.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not terrorists and paedophiles. They are the buzzwords that get used to push laws they know the public wouldn't like.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[MagickalMyst]

" They are the buzzwords that get used to push laws they know the public wouldn't like."

Whilst protecting their own. Oh, the irony.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[Flavianoep]

Whilst protecting their own what? Their own people?

Last time there was some political action against an actual threat, it was from the Mothers of America.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[Chris Mattern]

Why do no politician even think that a backdoor may be used by a terrorist or a paedophile?

Because computers are magic and all we have to do is make the magic keep the bad guys out.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[TeknoHog]

a backdoor may be used by ... a paedophile?

I see what you did there. Insert seal of approval.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[mark-t]

I can't say I know for sure, but I think that they have this notion that if someone other than authorized government personnel or law enforcement tries to use such a backdoor, that others will be sufficiently incompetent at using it that they will draw attention to themselves, and therefore get caught.

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[oobayly]

I think MagickalMyst is referring to paedophiles - there have been a number high ranking politicians who have been accused of paedophilia or sex abuse. It's important to note the "accused" bit, because most of them are dead (or suffer from dementia). The problem is that they're being accused posthumously which means that they can't defend themselves, and even if they were guilty they'd never pay for their crimes.

This was kicked off in the UK by the revelations that a popular entertainer - Jimmy Saville - had a history of sex abuse. This only came to light after his death when people were willing to come forward. Previous allegations had been swept under the carpet due to his connections with the BBC, politicians & royalty. Other people - notably Rolf Harris - have been convicted, whilst others have had their names dragged through the mud.

Put simply, it's a cluster-fuck. People are being deemed guilty by the general public because they've simply been arrested, whilst others have [most likely] gotten away with their crimes because of friends in high places. The only positive thing to come of this is that some offenders have been brought to justice (far to late, but anyhow), and the police are [hopefully] going to take action when reports of sexual abuse are made.

It's not just celebrities though - there was also the Rotherham abuse scandal - where it is "conservatively estimated that 1,400 children had been sexually abused in the town between 1997 and 2013". In that case the authorities were reluctant to pursue allegations " for fear of "giving oxygen" to racism."

Re:Terrorists and paedophiles

[MagickalMyst]

"I think MagickalMyst is referring to paedophiles"

Correct. Paedophilia is the fabric that binds the establishment together.

In the UK, there is the ongoing Jimmy Saville/Parliament/Royalty saga. In the US there is the Franklin Cover-Up; the Johnny Gosch story; McMartin Preschool case; in Canada there is the "Cornwall Clan", exposed by police officer Perry Dunlop; the Perth ring in Australia; and on and on and on....

Not to mention the Catholic church who has ties to all of these rings, as well as it's own multi-generational abuse network.

It is a global epidemic and it is also the core of the world's power structure.

licensed terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

Please simply make a law that requires terrorists to register with the government and acquire a proper license before launching any attacks. Problem solved!!!1!

Uk people, write to your MP

[throwaway18]

The draft bill is expected to be published tomorrow.
If you are in the UK please write to your local MP. Even a one sentence letter.

It will be too sad if this happens and we did not even try.

Re:Uk people, write to your MP

[coofercat]

I plan to start out by saying (as someone above said) that you can't pass a law to make maths easier. Then I'll go on to explain the One Time Pad, and after s/he is bamboozled with all that, suggest that they should indeed pass a law to make maths easier because it'll make our kids achieve far greater things than the rest of the world and make the scrambling of conversations easier to unscramble. There's no need to make this a "snoopers charter" - just make it an Education Bill instead ;-)

BREXIT, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear UKians: Please vote for BREXIT. At least until you fix your broken government.

After this, I'd welcome you back!

Totally unenforceable

[Alwin Henseler]

This is plain and simply the gubberment desperately trying to keep all windows of the Panopticon open. Clueless old 19th century minds trying to legislate against the future and maintain their failed baboon style pyramid hierarchy.

Indeed, this smells like government either not understanding technology and where it's moving, and/or conspiring with spy agencies to get (keep?) their fingers in everything - including where they shouldn't be.

Unfortunately for them, there is no middle ground here. If the plebs can use general-purpose computers, there will be ways to get strong encryption software on it. If it's agreed you should be able to have a strongly secured connection between you and your bank (or your webmail, or your doctor, or a business partner, etc, etc, etc), then you can have such a connection between you and say, some 3rd party outside the country. If there even were a way to 'allow what goes through the pipes' (other than a North Korea-like totalitarian regime), only allowing weak encryption would make a lot of present-day applications impossible, to the point where businesses would be forced to set up shop elsewhere. Of course we all know that even a government with a half a brain cell wouldn't let that happen.

Which simply leaves the other option: strong encryption in the hands of the public, possibly outside of the reach of government, law enforcement or spy agencies. Not to mention that if not allowed, technology together with the public will find ways around that.

Which would force those parties to either accept a more reasonable approach, attack encryption-using criminals through the legal system, social engineering and such, or attack implementations and endpoints of encryption use. Oh wait.. wasn't that the easiest method anyway? lol :-))

Pathetic Government

[Going_Digital]

The British government is filled with luddites. So those of us who have legitimate use for encryption have to put up with insecure tools while terrorists just use some software they get from their terrorist friends. Clueless government.

Re:Pathetic Government

[AmiMoJo]

Everyone has a legitimate use for encryption. Everyone has a right to privacy. It's a human right. The ECHR says so, and the UK wrote most of it.

Re:Pathetic Government

[simpz]

Couldn't agree more. This legislation is just to satisfy the Conservatives constituency of one foot in the grave grey haired that find this Internet stuff a bit scary.

Re:Pathetic Government

[Sir Foxx]

No, the British gov't is filled with pedophiles and fascists. If you live on that island I suggest getting off as quick as you can.

Defeats the purpose

[MagickalMyst]

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of using encryption in the first place?

"they don't want the likes of terrorists and paedophiles to communicate in places the Police can't reach."

Considering that the majority of terrorist organizations and pedophile rings are linked directly to the ruling elite, this isn't really surprising.

Terrorists and paedophiles

[Flavianoep]

Why do no politician even think that a backdoor may be used by a terrorist or a paedophile? A paedophile may take advantage of any vulnerability on an underage person's connected device, and those politicians want to ensure there be at least one? The same can be said about a terrorist getting info about British nationals which may pose threats their security and to the country's as well. Criminals use backdoors too.

Criminals and pedophiles

[Anonymous Coward]

With breakable encryption, criminals can edit your banking records and pedophiles can see all the "private" pics of your children. Do you really want breakable encryption?

Re:Criminals and pedophiles

[fendragon]

With breakable encryption, criminals can edit your banking records and pedophiles can see all the "private" pics of your children. Do you really want breakable encryption?

The UK government still seem to be enjoying the delusion that they can choose who can break encryption and who can't. I didn't vote for them, don't blame me!

Re:Criminals and pedophiles

[zlives]

" I didn't vote for them" if its anything like the US you don't have a voting choice.

Trading security for security?

[asylumx]

It seems to me that by doing this, the people of the UK are literally trading security for security. Or perhaps trading BOTH freedom and security for security. Not a good deal.

Re:I think they need to decide

[Ihlosi]

All encryption is breakable, given enough time.

Please elaborate on how to break a simple XOR-OTP. Bonus points if you can prove that your decrypted text actually matches the plaintext.

This will not work

[Anonymous Coward]

What this will do is generating a list of ways to divide the communication systems in layers, and offer the ability to add plugins on each of them.

Which will mean, that the users will be able to add whatever they want on it.

The software doesn't offer any encryption at all, however, the user is able to add it if he wants.

The pandora box is already opened.

per definition every crypto is breakable

[Gunstick]

Did they specify a timeframe how long it has to take to break the crypto?
If not, well, any crypto is breakable given infinite amount of time.

Which makes the law effectively useless as nothing changes.

Re:per definition every crypto is breakable

[ramriot]

OK, I get your point. But to be pedantic that is not true.

The strongest form of encryption is the One Time Pad. When used correctly it would be impossible without the key material to decrypt successfully. This is because from the ciphertext all plaintext strings are equally likely to be the decrypted message. Thus if you worked for an infinite time you would produce all possible plane texts of the length of the encrypted message, but you would not know which was the one sent.

Now OTP is really difficult to do properly because of the need to have a true random key the length of your message that is only known to the sender and recipient. But many modern forms of encryption are designed to share this fundamental property of indeterminacy of plaintexts, thus with this simple example many forms of encryption are effectively unbreakable without knowing some other information that would weaken the security model anyway.

Re:per definition every crypto is breakable

[geekmux]

Did they specify a timeframe how long it has to take to break the crypto? If not, well, any crypto is breakable given infinite amount of time.

Which makes the law effectively useless as nothing changes.

Understand that this kind of ignorance is exactly how we got here today. EVERY law has a reason and purpose to someone.

When you effectively make something illegal when it was not before, everything changes. New laws mean completely new or different groups get to enforce it, and with various measures you've not even thought of yet.

The general masses need to try and understand that as they let apathy continue to lead. A LOT of shit has changed in the last 30 years. Just because it was delivered via 10,000 tiny cuts doesn't make the change any less insignificant. It only demonstrates exactly how "nothing" changes.

I Doubt It

[JimSadler]

First unbreakable is a vague term. Just how could the English government know that other spy agencies have not broken a code? So they must mean a code that they can not break that others may have broken. Then there is the issue of not being able to govern other nations. So what their government must really mean or want to do is punish any of their subjects for using an unbreakable code. Really what we are seeing is that no government wants to allow people to freely communicate. The US has gone so far as to declare that very strong codes are munitions and that if such a code gets into public hands it is a serious crime. What people need to know is that many encryption programs are probably put into public hands by our spy agencies. We can not trust encryption to convey messages at all. Codes that were secure five years ago are probably not secure at all with more modern computers and software testing them. One wonders just how many months or years a spy agency would run a super computer trying to crack one message. Such an effort might generate millions of dollars in expenses and in this twisted world dredge up nothing more than grandma's cookie recipe.

Re:I Doubt It

[AHuxley]

A one time pad works. The privacy of the message is fine. The anonymity of the message is swapping details or meeting to set up the encryption is more work.
Re "One wonders just how many months or years a spy agency would run a super computer trying to crack one message.". most of the effort is in finding code use online in the wild and a location, details.
A keylogger ie "equipment interference" gets the plain text as its entered over a software, operating system or hardware layer thats always been wide open by design.
The user can have, create, sell, design, give away any export restricted crypto they like. As long as they can be made to feel very comfortable entering the plain text message into the computer/device every time, every decade.

V for Vendetta

[fgouget]

V for Vendetta, great comic, great movie and so very relevant to today's society.

Re:I think they need to decide

[aaaaaaargh!]

I wouldn't call ROT-13 encryption, because it doesn't have a key. Perhaps you could call ROT-n encryption, where n is the key.

I smell a false flag

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me a paranoid if you want, but this 'new law banning unbreakable crypto thing smells rotten

1. The very mention of unbreakable crypto might give people some false sense of security to think that they still have something that can stop NSA / GCHQ from prying into their files

2. The very word 'unbreakable' is misleading - as nothing, absolutely nothing - is unbreakable, in the tech scene

3. The entire thing could be an attempt by some one high up (even higher than the politicians) to instill the impression that the Western governments (including their respective spy agencies) are weak, useless and clueless - which we already know, is not the case

Re:I smell a false flag

[Kiaser Zohsay]

2. The very word 'unbreakable' is misleading - as nothing, absolutely nothing - is unbreakable, in the tech scene

Yes, but anything that you can refer to as "breakable" encryption is really no encryption at all.

And even if you are paranoid, somebody might still be out to get you.

Re:I smell a false flag

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

2. The very word 'unbreakable' is misleading - as nothing, absolutely nothing - is unbreakable, in the tech scene

Cryptographic algorithms can be unbreakable using known technology. Implementations of cryptographic algorithms often have flaws that can be exploited and hence are breakable. What they are trying to ban is the use of cryptographic algorithms that are "unbreakable" in that sense.

3. The entire thing could be an attempt by some one high up (even higher than the politicians) to instill the impression that the Western governments (including their respective spy agencies) are weak, useless and clueless - which we already know, is not the case

How do "we" know that? The fact that Western governments can spy on your grandmother's E-mail communication doesn't mean that they have an effective spy program, only that they have an intrusive spy program. Their actual target groups seem to be quite good at using cryptography and other tools effectively.

Re:I smell a false flag

[interval1066]

To date AES-256 is still secure, at least the NSA doesn't confirm or deny they can break it, most researchers assume they haven't yet, although quantum decryption methods may change that, certainly. And of course one-time pads are by their nature unbreakable.

Re:I smell a false flag

[mark-t]

An encryption is considered unbreakable if it requires a copy of the original key to decode into the original message, and there is absolutely no way to ever tell whether any key you might try to use to decrypt it actually gives you the original message unless you knew in advance what the original message was.

Re:I smell a false flag

[Jane Q. Public]

Some things, as a practical matter, are indeed unbreakable. Like a good one-time pad.

Very old, but extremely simple, and used every day by spy agencies around the world.

Nothing is unbreakable

[abednegoyulo]

if given an infinite amount of time.

Re:Nothing is unbreakable

[Bob the Super Hamste]

You forgot the other part of that which is also having infinite energy.

Response to Snowden

[MightyDrunken]

Looking at some of the powers in the Investigatory powers bill reminds me strongly of the GCHQ's Tempora project and other capabilities. Snowden's whistle blowing has created a lot of debate and the main response by politicians seems to be to codify these once secret programs into law with barely a nod to oversight.

They want criminals to have access to all info

[Attila Dimedici]

SO, what they are saying is that they do not want you to be able to protect your information from criminals, because if the Police have a way to break your encryption, than so do the criminals (including terrorists). And, what they are overlooking is that either no one has "unbreakable" encryption (for whatever value of unbreakable they are using), including the government, or the criminals will have access to "unbreakable" encryption, but not law abiding subjects. The end result is that criminals will have greater power.

Re:I think they need to decide

[Sique]

In a way, OTP is not an encryption, as in fact you are sending only half of the information with an OTP encoded message.

Soo...

[wardrich86]

If the government uses "unbreakable" encryption, does this mean they're terrorists and/or pedophiles?

Re:Soo...

[bluefoxlucid]

Won't the terrorists and pedophiles just bring their own encryption?

Who will fold first?

[Holi]

Apple and Google or the UK when Apple and Google no longer sell their products there?

Re:Boycott

[Holi]

So what Apple is going to make a UK product and one for the rest of the world? Nope the UK market just ain't that big.

Can't offer unbreakable?

[advocate_one]

Well now, how to define unbreakable... if it truly is unbreakable, then it would take infinite processing capability an infinite time... Now if it only takes infinity MINUS one day, then it is breakable...

Careful, you may not like what you get...

I truly suspect that what they really want is backdoors put in...

Re:Can't offer unbreakable?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I like this reasoning. As all modern encryption schemes to have a lower bound on the amount of time and energy required to crack them it means they are all allowable. It just so happens that for a number of them you would be harvesting a sizable portion of the energy available in the universe but that doesn't mean it couldn't be theoretically done.

Doomed, yer all doomed!

[ramriot]

So basically this article: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstrea...

The cat is out of the bag, that train has left the station and other sayings.

You cannot mandate against an idea, encryption is out there, we all rely on it increasingly to manage our very existence. If you mandate that industry weakens the end-to-end secure model then bad things will happen, first the public will make losses, then industry will loose customers and finally the industry donations to the pocket books of politicians and come election time, they will loose.

Which means any politician who suggests this is either a) deluded, b) working for the criminals, c) using it as a false flag to cover something else, in all cases they are automatically unelectable.

Make this clear to your MP that any suggestions like this are an affront to a free and democratic society and will not be tolerated.

I think it's safe to say

[101percent]

These people don't care about securing the INTERNET. It's becoming so obvious it's just a power grab. We've got SCADA systems on the net with embedded accounts, and some group of people who can't even spell cryptography and probably cannot do single variable calc telling us they know how to secure things. It's about control. It's up to us to create and defend a safe & free INTERNET for all. Redesign it from the ground up if we have to.

But at least someone is thinking

[backwardsposter]

But at least someone is thinking of the children!

Re:I think they need to decide

[Tuxavant]

Not entirely correct. The pad can be derived from a seed. Then you only need to transmit the initial seed, the ciphertext and keep track of the offsets.

Re:I think they need to decide

[Chas]

Actually ROT-13 DOES have a key.

It's simply not transmitted with the message.

The key is...knowledge of the alphabet and the way ROT-13 works (letter substitution).

Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

I work for Google. I build strong encryption in Android. The possibility of laws mandating back doors creates an interesting dilemma for me. Supposing such a law were to exist, and were effectively enforced so there's no possibility of sneaking in a non-backdoored system, what would I do?

I see three options.

1. I could run away from the problem, changing jobs to let someone else deal with it.
2. I could accede, trying to build the tightest, narrowest, best-controlled backdoor possible, doing my best to ensure that only authorized government agencies could use it.
3. I could refuse to build strong security systems at all, making it clear to everyone that their data is unprotected.

What's the right thing to do? #1 is out, unless I have some reason to believe that someone else could make better decisions. #3 has some nose-thumbing appeal, but it means that everyone's data is accessible not only to government agencies, but to thieves, family members, spouses, etc. Also, this may be equivalent to #1, in that I'll be shuffled to another job and replaced by someone willing to build back doors.

So, frankly, it's actually not much of a dilemma at all. I would do #2 (choice of number was not accidental). Well, and I'd probably also contribute to open source, possibly underground strong crypto implementations in my free time, because I strongly believe that the ability of people to keep secrets is critical to individual freedom and to societal progress. But such systems would only be used by a handful, seriously reducing their value.

It's really, really important that we fight this sort of thing in the public, though. I've never been asked to build in back doors, and I never want to be.

Oh, and by the way: Those of you out there who complain that you don't want full device encryption because it's slow? The slowness may be annoying, but it's well worth it. Not so much to you, now, but to everyone, in the future. Have a little patience with it. It will get faster over time as hardware gets faster and perhaps dedicated encryption hardware is added, but if we don't get it in now, setting the precedent that it's normal to encrypt everything, all the time, with the strongest crypto we can find and no back doors, there's a much greater risk that we may not be allowed to do it later.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget option 4 - refuse to work for such an unethical organization and find more honest work.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Don't forget option 4 - refuse to work for such an unethical organization and find more honest work.

Mu.

Google is a highly ethical organization. That you don't think so is due to your own ignorance, not the organization.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[clonehappy]

*looks over shoulder*

"Google. Is. The. Most. Ethical. Organization. In. The. World."

*looks back over shoulder*

Thank goodness they're gone.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[fustakrakich]

Google is a highly ethical organization.

*He was a good, quiet man, always said 'hi' to the neighbors, petted the dogs, kissed the babies, even picked up stray litter off the sidewalk...*

Schoolyard shooting kills 20

*Nobody expected this!!*

I'm sorry sir, we really don't know anybody, especially with this kind of wealth/power involved. I would say your view is somewhat, narrow?

And "strong" crypto? Only to a weak challenger..

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[Burz]

AC makes a good point. Google and Apple should tell their UK customers the law leaves them open to hacking and mass surveillance and they will withdraw from that market instead of weakening their products.

Think about it: Person with a Google product enters the UK and has to expect their device suddenly becomes weak? That's untenable. The user must assume the device can be spoofed into weak mode wherever they are.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[Burz]

Besides the option to withdraw from the UK market in protest (coordinating this with Apple would be highly effective, I think) you could also make your security protocols modular, so users can freely download stronger FOSS versions.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Not in the scenario you described. Take as a given that laws mandating crypto backdoors are unethical. Then Google would be unethical for adhering to those laws

As opposed to building systems without any security, or as opposed to not building systems at all? Ethics is about choices between alternatives, it's not unethical to do a bad thing if all of the other alternatives are worse.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Besides the option to withdraw from the UK market in protest (coordinating this with Apple would be highly effective, I think)

Assuming the UK government doesn't cave, that's equivalent to options 1 and/or 3. Because someone will build devices for that market that do comply... and may not do nearly as good a job of limiting the risk of the backdoor.

you could also make your security protocols modular, so users can freely download stronger FOSS versions.

Sure, but you still have the problem that hardly anyone would do it.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[zedaroca]

Because someone will build devices for that market that do comply

Yes, Baidu is really strong. But it is up to the UK people to decide what kind of country they want.

Participating in massive human rights violations is not ethical, even if you tell yourself you are doing it to protect people from greater harm. That is exactly what the UK government is planning to do (terrorists in their case, bad programmers in your case).

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[chihowa]

Ethics is about choices between alternatives, it's not unethical to do a bad thing if all of the other alternatives are worse.

You've artificially narrowed the alternatives so that you can rationalize choosing an unethical one. Even choice #1, refusing to do the bad thing, was artificially constrained so that it could be dismissed out of hand.

Your mindset and capability for rationalizing unethical acts doesn't give me much faith in Google as a "highly ethical organization". Did they teach you these methods?

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[somenickname]

4. Encourage your employer to stop sales in the UK

I can't imagine anything more able to get the masses frothing at the mouth than learning that their government has effectively made Apple/Android devices illegal.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Nice Godwinning.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Ethics is about choices between alternatives, it's not unethical to do a bad thing if all of the other alternatives are worse.

You've artificially narrowed the alternatives so that you can rationalize choosing an unethical one. Even choice #1, refusing to do the bad thing, was artificially constrained so that it could be dismissed out of hand.

Okay, what are the other effective alternatives? Note that I'm assuming effective enforcement, so sneaking in a non-backdoored system isn't feasible.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[chihowa]

There are dozens of suggestions in response to your first post, but the most common suggestion is the one that I think is the most obvious: don't participate in adding backdoors to encryption software.

The rationalization that somebody else will inevitably do some "bad thing" (and maybe do a poor job of it) doesn't make it ethical for you to do that "bad thing". You are responsible for your own actions and not the assumed actions of others.

There are very few paths from willingly participating in bad things to having those actions described as ethical. This is a very well covered philosophical concept.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[Burz]

Large tech companies -- including Google -- have exited countries before over repressive laws; The "someone will build it" argument therefore rings hollow. And this may not sound comforting to you, but Apple users in particular may find their devices irreplaceable.

Sure, but you still have the problem that hardly anyone would do it.

I think plenty would. We're not talking about PGP Mail here, and there are examples of millions of people installing alternate apps and utilities for communication. The act of adding a stronger cipher to a device should be painless and having chat/telephony apps that inform the user of the cipher strength could reinforce the opt-in dynamics.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

There are dozens of suggestions in response to your first post, but the most common suggestion is the one that I think is the most obvious: don't participate in adding backdoors to encryption software.

The rationalization that somebody else will inevitably do some "bad thing" (and maybe do a poor job of it) doesn't make it ethical for you to do that "bad thing".

So, option 1.

Honestly, my response is *not* a convenient rationalization. Perhaps it would be for an iOS engineer, but Android is open source.

Let's suppose that Google simply refused. What would happen? Would Samsung, HTC, LG, etc. simply say "Oh, okay, well, I guess we can't sell our devices in the UK. Darn." Absolutely not. They'd add a backdoor and sell lots of devices, and there isn't a thing Google could do about it. How well would they do at keeping the backdoor as absolutely narrow as possible? Recall that one of the major vendors was found to be storing fingerprints in cleartext, world-readable. That's not atypical.

Given that, what would Google's refusal accomplish? I suppose I personally could feel better about myself for having refused, but not much better, since it would actually have made the world worse.

You are responsible for your own actions and not the assumed actions of others.

Bullshit. If you know that your decision to do (or not do) X will result in some bad outcome Y, it's nothing but a cop out to say that because you didn't yourself do Y that you are not responsible for it. If you could have prevented it, or at least made it less bad, and you didn't, then you are responsible. This means that if the actions of others are clearly and easily predictable then it's unethical to ignore them in your calculation of what action you yourself should take.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Large tech companies -- including Google -- have exited countries before over repressive laws; The "someone will build it" argument therefore rings hollow.

You think Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. would refuse to sell devices in the UK if Google didn't provide what was required? I think you're forgetting that Android is open source.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[chihowa]

Hey, whatever helps you sleep at night, but claiming that the world is a better place because you did a bad thing is an act of rationalization. Because so many people do this, we live in a world where bad things are constantly done and the people who do them sleep well at night, cozy in their rationalizations. Each of these people have actually made the world a worse place.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

So, you can't actually counter my argument, and instead have to fall back on generalities and platitudes.

BTW: http://www.appy-geek.com/Web/A...

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Hit send too soon.

I should also point out that all of the people who believe that they can divorce themselves of responsibility for the results of their actions just because they themselves didn't directly cause the outcome is an even bigger source of making the world a worse place. Truly ethical people consider all of the ramifications of their options, rather than just washing their hands and telling the world that they didn't do the bad thing.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[chihowa]

Are you implying that Google's own software hasn't also had security issues? Even if you write the backdoor code instead of leaving it to somebody else, it will invariably have issues. Even if written perfectly, because of the nature of backdoors.

Being a huge and influential company, Google has other avenues beside just compliance. If Google can thumb its nose at China, then a little market like the UK doesn't need to be unquestioningly obeyed. This problem needs a solution that doesn't involve weakening security in any way and providing an official (from Google) backdoor only prolongs the push to get rid of such legal requirements.

(This is the around the depth where Slashdot's nesting code starts really screwing up, so forgive me if I lose the thread here.)

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[Burz]

Large tech companies -- including Google -- have exited countries before over repressive laws; The "someone will build it" argument therefore rings hollow.

You think Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. would refuse to sell devices in the UK if Google didn't provide what was required? I think you're forgetting that Android is open source.

The search engine, maps and other services are not, however.

Re:Interesting philosophical dilemma

[swillden]

Large tech companies -- including Google -- have exited countries before over repressive laws; The "someone will build it" argument therefore rings hollow.

You think Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. would refuse to sell devices in the UK if Google didn't provide what was required? I think you're forgetting that Android is open source.

The search engine, maps and other services are not, however.

And all are easily replaced with competitor's products. I suppose if Google could arrange a pact with Microsoft, it would at least take a little time for replacements to spring up. Given Microsoft's history and philosophy, though, I don't think they'd play ball.

^ UK Privacy Laws in sharp Decline.

[wjdw]

This is exactly why we moved Invacio away from the UK, as the privacy rights were getting worse and worse, we only this week went in to open beta on Invmail (Zero-Knowledge, 3 way encrypted, digital communications platform, allowing secure email communication inc meta data), and are shortly launching our Voice/Video conference capabilities as well as messaging over Invmail in the coming months as we come out of beta, And then the UK go and pull a stunt like this....

Capitalist indoctrination makes them blind

[johanw]

They mention only companies, assuming power over them if they sell products in the UK. The capitalist status quo. So open source software or free software developed outside the UK can just ignore that law. Blocking services might be an option (Signal / TextSecure) or not (SMSSecure, pgp/GnuPG).

Re:Capitalist indoctrination makes them blind

[fustakrakich]

Well, there is that, and the service provider can just drop encrypted packets when and where desired.

Re:Capitalist indoctrination makes them blind

[david_thornley]

I suspect it's harder to tell encrypted packets from simple binary data than you think (particularly as there's ways to put secret messages into JPEGs and the like), but I'd bet it's effectively impossible to tell the difference between packets with government-approved crypto and real crypto.

Apple and Google welcome this I guess

[goombah99]

Apple and Google I think won't mind this too much. I suspect they wanted to force the issue that the government has to come out and say, we will search e-mails rather than putting the squeeze on apple privately to sell out their customers with secret deals. If they get caught like AT&T did, it makes them look like crap and it doesn't hurt their competitors equally. Now if apple turns over a message they can just say every does it because its the law, and that's a fact. The "unbreakable" encryption part was probably inconvenient for gathering data. Apple I suspect still wants data, to make siri smarter, and searches more relevant. Google wants data because using it to sell improved advertising is their bussiness.

Surprising

[OverlyGenericUsernam]

The summery was very surprising to me, I didn't know terrorists and pedophiles were working together.

Re:I think they need to decide

[driblio]

Not really. Saying 'all encryption is breakable' is like saying 'all messages are guessable'.

If your scheme (think one time pad) has no authentication, you can decrypt it in as many different ways as you like- you'll never know which is the actual one.

Ever 'given enough time' is invalid - our current understanding is that the heat death of the universe will come before guessing a 256 bit key correctly.

Proxy+cert to decrypt, or just disable https entir

[raymorris]

I haven't seen any mention that they have to STORE all web traffic or other data, only that it can be decrypted (potentially in real time), so I don't know that they have to retroactively decrypt it.

If they wanted to be able to decrypt it, that's easy enough. the browser contain a list of trusted root certificates which are allowed to sign https certificates. They could add their own cert, or the government's cert, as a trusted root. That would allow the government to impersonate the bank or other https site. The browser (or ISP) would also be set to us the government's system as a proxy, so that the government would receive the connection, claim to be Bank.com (proved by their cert), and then forward traffic to the real bank.com. Easy enough.

A more courageous and simpler option would be to simply remove support for https in the UK model. When you try to use https, the browser instead displays the message "secure connections are banned in the UK. Contact your Minister of Parliament _here_ for more information."

Would it also be illegal

[presidenteloco]

for companies like Google, Apple etc to make their communication software accept plug-ins that perform end-to-end encryption on the emails or whatever.
For example, plug-ins that implement one-time-pad encryption or some other currently non-known-breakable encryption invented by any random "non-corporate" "amateur" with a PhD in comp sci. ?

Maybe that's what this law would encourage. The support for pluggable end-to-end encryption into common cloud/net apps.

Re:Would it also be illegal

[Burz]

This is an interesting idea! Then the government would be in the position of trying to approve every little bit of software a user downloads in order to make their panopticon work.

Its simple, elegant and uses a feature of personal computing to defeat a clueless bureaucracy.

A secure channel and a fast channel

[tepples]

But if you had a reliable secure channel, you wouldn't need any encryption to begin with. You could send the actual data over that secure channel instead.

It appears several cryptosystems are designed to run over two channels: a reliable secure channel with low throughput, and a faster but insecure channel. This way, the parties run key exchange over the former and ciphertext over the latter. This is certainly true of quantum key exchange.

Re:A secure channel and a fast channel

[bickerdyke]

But those "unbreakable" encryptions need to transmit a random key the size of the data.

Re:A secure channel and a fast channel

[tepples]

The nigh-unbreakable systems, where a break might take the age of the universe even for a nation-state, can send less key material than ciphertext. But even the truly unbreakable ones can accumulate key material over a channel with low but consistent throughput and then send ciphertext over a faster, burstier channel.

Re:A secure channel and a fast channel

[bickerdyke]

But then we're talking about the "breakable, just need a few million years to crack it" whicht started the discussion.

I think the key point to assess the security of a cipher for practical use is that it's common knowledge how long it would take to break it - which in turn means that you have to have an idea how or when it is broken.

Re:This is Unenforceable

[Anonymous Coward]

These devices are all broken except for the very latest smartphones. This law is about saving money by not having to develop or buy 0-day exploits for the latest iPhones, because Apple allegedly stopped "playing by the rules" of storing the encryption key or leaving a backdoor open.

Magna Carta

[tepples]

Where you see "UK constitution" read "Magna Carta". True, much of the Magna Carta has since been amended away in various SLRAs, but the same is true of the U.S. Constitution.

Then they'd regulate VPN providers as ISPs

[tepples]

As long as the VPN service provider complies with local data retention laws (of which there are none, they only apply to ISPs)

The idea would be to treat service providers offering VPN service to the public as Internet service providers, just using the customer's existing Internet connection as the last mile instead of DOCSIS or DSL.

Lol define "unbreakable"

[Tyrannosaur]

When faced with a court order for information, apple can say "sure can do, just give us a quantum computer and 300 billion years"

Fire the cloud, take responsibility for the net

[WaffleMonster]

That they are even declaring rules for "internet firms" holding customer data and facilitating communications and encryption means we have already failed. The network was intended to be a network of PEERS. Third parties should only be used for discovery they should not be relied upon to facilitate communication. The Internet will not "route around censorship" when the only thing left is a handful of content companies controlling everything.

Don't use third parties to facilitate communication. Communicate directly amoungst yourselves this way both parties to the communication always have a way to decrypt it.

It's not a safe space for them to communicate on a fixed line telephone or a mobile phone, we shouldn't allow the internet to be a safe space for them to communicate and do bad things

Since the dawn of civilization people have communicated in code to obscure their communications from others. This isn't a new phenomenon it is an ancient one. They did it on land line phones, they did it in hand delivered notes, they did it electronically with modems, they do it in the mail, on mobiles, telegraphs, in person. People leave hidden or obvious public messages which are only understandable by intended recipients. You can't prevent use of things like OTP codebooks even if you took everyone's computers away.

The difference is encryption today takes less manual effort to pull off than it has in the past and more people feel compelled to use it if for no other reason than to protect themselves from the hostile environment they find themselves.

I think it is absurd to suggest the police and the security services have a kind of casual desire to intrude on the privacy of the innocent

This is amusing governments grant themselves all kinds of powers to snoop around and spy on their own people then act surprised when nobody believe a damn thing they have to say. Enough people have access to the government codebook to know what the words "terrorist" and "children" really mean.

It's all breakable

[TheGrimmReaper]

Yes Sir our code is breakable, you just have to brute force it for a few thousand years or have a REALLY fast collection of computers. Do you have that Minister? Oh, you don't? Well, it's still breakable, just not by YOU then :)

Re:I think they need to decide

[JesseMcDonald]

The pad can be derived from a seed.

If you do that, it isn't a one-time pad any more, and none of the "provably unbreakable" guarantees of one-time pads apply. All you have is standard symmetric encryption with a stream cipher.

A critical part of any one-time pad is the fact that each bit of the pad is independently and uniformly random. If you generate the pad from a seed then an attacker no longer needs to find the pad; they only need to find the seed. And as there are far fewer seeds than plausible messages, they'll probably be able to detect when they've found the right one.

Just use "illegal" crypto?

[CoOtter77]

Maybe I'm missing something here... but why wouldn't a criminal just use easily obtained "illegal" unbreakable crypto obtained from a friend in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world?

Re:This is Unenforceable

[zlives]

yes but once its the law it becomes a criminal offense to facilitate control.

Re:I think they need to decide

[david_thornley]

For keys of a few hundred bits, "enough time" means "far past the heat death of the Universe". AES-256 cannot be brute-forced with theoretically perfect quantum computers using all the resources in the Solar System.

Old school cool

[ememisya]

Wake me up when the King can kiss the bride on her wedding day.

No such thing

[MacColossus]

Since all encryption is breakable given enough time and compute (might take a few years), technically all are automatically in compliance with no change.

Let's put the horse before the cart.

[Macdude]

âoeThe Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts."

I'll tell you what, you put a system in place with clear oversight and a robust legal framework then we'll talk.

The premise behind Mirror's Edge just became true

[Rainwulf]

Wow london. You have done it. You have successfully used George Orwell's novel as a template to create the perfect surveillance state. I hope your prime minister is proud of himself.

Draft Investigatory Powers Bill is Out

[MightyDrunken]

Until now the stories about the Investigatory Powers Bill have been hard to gauge as the bill was not published, but now it is.

The Slashdot title, "Internet Firms To Be Banned From Offering Unbreakable Encryption Under New UK Laws" looks to be wrong or at least misleading. The relevant part of the bill states:

62. ... b. RIPA requires CSPs to provide communications data when served with a notice, to assist in giving effect to interception warrants, and to maintain permanent interception capabilities, including maintaining the ability to remove any encryption applied by the CSP to whom the notice relates. 63. ...The draft Bill will not impose any additional requirements in relation to encryption over and above the existing obligations in RIPA. ...

So Communications Service Providers can have strong encryption, as long as they keep the key and hand it over when required as they are required already by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The horse has already bolted.

They are so cute when they're stupid (UK not slash

[nerdpocalypse]

This is so veddy veddy British. They think they actually can decide for the world about encryption. I'm a not-very-good script kiddie and I sorta-kinda knew how to do (some) of the many methods outlined here. Anyone who wants can just encrypt whatever they want and mostly it's not at all breakable and the amount of effort if even 1% of internet traffic is encrypted by different ways becomes prohibitively tedious to do anything about.

How is jurisdiction going to work here?

[Meski]

Will there be a 'lame special' model especially for the UK? If there is, how hard isn't it going to be to jailbreak it to the international version?

What does "unbreakable" mean in practice?

[LinuxLuver]

Govt: "You're using unbreakable encryption." ISP: "No. We're not. We're pretty sure you can break it if you'd really want to." Govt: "We can't break it." ISP: "Don't believe you. You can break any thing with enough resources. What do you want us to do? Store data in plug Latin?"