Crypto Guru David Chaum's Private Communications Network Comes With a Backdoor (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: David Chaum, father of many encryption protocols, has revealed a new anonymity network concept called PrivaTegrity. Chaum, on who's work the Onion protocol was based, created a new encryption protocol that works as fast as I2P and the Onion-Tor combo, but also has better encryption. The only downside, according to an interview, is that he built a backdoor into the darn thing, just to please governments. He says that he's not going to use the backdoor unless to unmask crime on the Dark Web. Here's the research paper (if you can understand anything of it).

Comments

Interesting -

[Anonymous Coward]

When PrivaTegrity’s setup is complete, "Nine Server Administrators" in nine different countries would all need to cooperate to trace criminals within the network and decrypt their communications.

Re:Interesting -

[epyT-R]

and this would protect against groupthink powered populist witchhunts how exactly? These days, most governments are more than willing to 'cooperate' when dealing with dissent in any one of their countries (eg: multilateral surveillance to get around civil protections). It would be relatively easy to put the squeeze on those nine people. It's hard enough to both design and implement crypto correctly as it is. It's a waste of time to bother implementing purposely compromised crypto.

Worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What you can do, your enemy can do". "Security" doesn't happen when you have backdoors, for anyone, period.

Re:A secure backdooor?

[negRo_slim]

The system is spread out amongst many different countries in such a way that many different governments must agree to use the back door. If the USA, the Netherlands, and Russia can agree, for example, then it is probably criminal investigation and not spying going on.

I can't believe you could be that naive.