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A Complete Guide To The New 'Crypto Wars' (dailydot.com)
blottsie writes: The latest debate over encryption did not begin with a court order demanding Apple help the FBI unlock a dead terrorist's iPhone. The new "Crypto Wars," chronicled in a comprehensive timeline by Eric Geller of the Daily Dot, dates back to at least 2003, with the introduction of "Patriot Act II." The battle over privacy and personal security versus crime-fighting and national security has, however, become a mainstream debate in recent months. The timeline covers a wide-range of incidents where the U.S. and other allied governments have tried to restrict citizens' access to strong encryption. The timeline ends with the director of national intelligence blaming NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the spread of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption.
It's fantastic that tech companies are fighting/discussing this in public, for too many years it been totally behind closed doors in secret meeting.
Oh, that's just grand. I would blame the governments, who through their spying actions wake up folks and make them aware that they now need encryption. Otherwise, some government jerk will be reading their email . . . with the intention of stalking.
Oh, can the government maybe blame Global Warming and the Zika Virus on Snowden, as well . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
People are expected to learn at an age of around 4, that if you bite the kid next to you, he'll either bite you back or cry and make someone else punish you for the biting. Apparently, becoming a decision maker in the justice department, the FBI or the CIA, doesn't require having acquired such wisdom.
More seriously, though, the only realistic explanations to the imbecile behavior of American governance towards cryptography is probably a mix of a few lines of reasoning:
- "So what if my decisions of today have dire consequences in tomorrow's landscape? I won't be in power tomorrow, so I don't give a flying fuck."
- "I don't understand any technology beyond the automobile, and I really don't care. Just give me a way of invading privacy now and shut up."
- "So what if today's abuses of power make everyone use cryptography tomorrow? It will just be one more reason to abuse our power even more tomorrow. Everyone outside the 0.01% is a potential terrorist criminal revolutionary."
Kim Jung-Il, is that you?
Clearly not. If it was, his thoughts would have been communicated telepathically to your mind through his unicorn.
Cuz no body would b able 2 read it genius????
The Patriot act changed things for the worse, but I feel the timeline should look back further.
In France for example, the use of encryption was illegal until 1999 (and even worse before 1990). Sending an encrypted mail or encrypting a document could be punished with heavy fines and even jail sentences.
That law was changed after banks, among others, complained that it made it impossible to use the internet in a secure way.
So you could say that the discussion goes back to at least the end of the 90's. And probably to WWII, if you look close enough :)
The war over civilian use of crypto goes back to at least 1994 with skipjack...how quickly they forget
nothing to see here - move along
Or something. Crypto, by Stephen Levy, chronicles the first crypto war. Worth reading, for background, because this time, it's not "national security", it's kiddie porn and terrorists that are going to win if we don't give the Security Services the keys to everything. And, we should TOTALLY trust them to keep us safe.
Yeah, right.
http://www.stevenlevy.com/inde...
worth reading to understand my last comment.
nothing to see here - move along
"In order to save the village, we had to destroy it."
"In order to defend the Constitution, we had to shred it."
Had they stuck with assisting ICE, CPB and the Coast Guard, it would have been a ho hum revelation that they were feeding law enforcement active intelligence because those agencies are interdiction agencies that operate at or beyond the borders. It was when it was discovered that the NSA was going well beyond its mission and helping law enforcement in many other ways that the public started caring. It was all totally preventable. All the director had to do is issue a directive that they will not turn over any data to law enforcement operating within territorial boundaries except on national security cases.
The current round goes back to at least the exposure of PGP.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
So how many of you so-called geniuses ( Wiley Coyote ) have even begun to look at cryptology and math, and started to try to develop a few methods not of the usual sort? Maybe if a few hundred new encrypton algorithms were to suddenly pop-up, the governments would be a bit behind the curve of breaking them... and thus the race will go to the prolific instead off to the analytic... AND how many of you have begun to encrypt as much as possible? Just to ensure a good work load for the nosy buggers? ( I want my government workers to be busy...)
Somebody obviously thinks you're trolling. I suspect you are too; but I also think you're making a valid, (if somewhat exaggerated and inflammatory), argument for diversity and original research in encryption. Probably a worthwhile percentage of Slashdot members are actually capable of undertaking the work you suggest.
Also, their IS more safety in numbers - if everybody used encryption, there would be a more even balance of power between the people, and the government that is nominally of, by, and for them. Government agencies can have secure, private communications; citizens have the right to the same capability, and at the same degree of effectiveness. In fact, citizens should have the ability to pierce the government veil a lot more than is currently the case - but that's a whole 'nother argument.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Actually, I am not trolling. I firmly believe that more ( /.ers, OS programmers, EFF ) should be doing this. I am.
And the upshot is that the government will have to do more work to watch us, the citizens. Maybe enough that they will actually limit their snooping to terrorists
( although I doubt it, they do want to use it for drug investigations, kiddie porn and IRS searches for hidden money....).
Sometimes one must exaggerate and be inflammatory to get results.
Other times it is a dare ( triple-dipple-dog dare) that gets results.
Then there is the simple appeal to actually do something instead of just blogging complaints and opinions.
Maybe if more girls would ask their boyfriend-programmers to do an encryption to send pics......
By people that don't know what they're talking about. The San Bernardino case has nothing to do with "restrict[ing] citizens' access to strong encryption". It's about establishing a precedent that law enforcement can tap into a software companies inherent backdoors. In this case, the Apple backdoor is their master signing key for software updates. It seems obvious from their resistance, and other evidence, that even their "secure enclave" is vulnerable to custom firmware images. If Apple wants to truly absolve all responsibility they simply have to let users install ios firmware built with their own private signing key. Of course, this makes even the newest ios build jail-breakable, which prevents Apple from locking you into whatever "experience" they're currently trying to define. Something seemingly more important to them than the security of your data.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
they still have not broken XOR and a one time pad.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about "The debate between privacy and security." It's total bullshit. It's pretty hard to have security online without privacy. It's not a balance of one versus the other, one depends on the other. The US Government argues my case all the time when bitching about how when Snowden breached the government's privacy, he adversely affected national security.
This brings me to my next piece of pedantry: I'm tired of hearing about "National Security Issues." Terrorism, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/IS/Whatever, Al Qaeda, Home Grown Terrorists, Lone Wolves, the Boston Marathon Bombers, etc... do not threaten the territorial integrity of the United States. There is no invasion and there never will be. The government isn't in danger of collapse. Terrorism is a PUBLIC SAFETY concern. Stop pretending otherwise. If we do that though, who is going to keep the money flowing in to the military/industrial complex?
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
So how many of you so-called geniuses ( Wiley Coyote ) have even begun to look at cryptology and math, and started to try to develop a few methods not of the usual sort?
Wrong approach. If you want to improve the state of crypto, you need to start by learning to break crypto. Anyone can invent an encryption method, but unless you have invested a serious amount of time and skull-sweat into breaking ciphers, whatever you create will suck, terribly.
Maybe if a few hundred new encrypton algorithms were to suddenly pop-up, the governments would be a bit behind the curve of breaking them.
Your plan would make the government's job much, much easier, because the methods that people tend to come up with are mostly very closely related, and tend to all be based on independent reinvention of old ideas for which well-known cracking methods exist. In addition, you're solving a non-problem. We already have very good encryption algorithms, with zero evidence that the government can break them. Snowden's data actually confirms that if you use modern encryption algorithms correctly and manage the keys well, the NSA can't read your data.
What we need is more research into ways to make encryption easier to use correctly, not another gazillion crappy ciphers.
That would definitely make the man somewhat of a hero. He would be even more of a hero by his actions if they advance the purging of all incumbents from the House in November and replaced by independents.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Kim Jong-Il died December 17, 2011. You might want to update your spam macros.
They will never get the contents of my secret file /dev/random from me..... POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As someone who has recently had my interest in this topic reignited you are correct that it is mostly about understating how to break crypto that leads to better crypto. Understanding the math isn't all that difficult if you have an applied math (CS) degree and a willingness to learn as when I was first interested in crypto about 20 years ago there wasn't as much info freely available to learn from and what was there was difficult to find. All of the major symmetric key crypto algorithms are just variations on the Feistel Network structure going back to the early 70s. Here is a paper I was reading just last night on the evaluation on all 16! 4x4bit s-boxes but most ciphers use 8x8-bit S-boxes. There is also a lot that can be learned by looking back at the NIST evaluations of the AES finalists and reading and understanding them.
Time to offend someone
All of the major symmetric key crypto algorithms are just variations on the Feistel Network [wikipedia.org] structure going back to the early 70s.
AES (Rijndael) does not use a Feistel network, and neither does Serpent, another of the five AES finalists (Twofish, RC6 and MARS are based on Feistel networks).