UK Gov Says New Home Sec Will Have Powers To Ban End-to-end Encryption (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: During a committee stage debate in the UK's House of Lords yesterday, the government revealed that the Investigatory Powers Bill will provide any Secretary of State with the ability to force communication service providers (CSPs) to remove or disable end-to-end encryption. Earl Howe, a Minister of State for Defence and the British government's Deputy Leader in the House of Lords, gave the first explicit admission that the new legislation would provide the government with the ability to force CSPs to "develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data".

This power, if applied, would be imposed upon domestic CSPs by the new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who was formerly the secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change. Rudd is now only the fifth woman to hold one of the great offices of state in the UK. As she was only appointed on Wednesday evening, she has yet to offer her thoughts on the matter.

Comments

1984

[Anonymous Coward]

Just checked the calendar. It is 1984.

Re:1984

[sTERNKERN]

Wish I had mod points... First I thought of a +1 Funny but on second thought it should be +1 Informative.

Re:1984

[fustakrakich]

Just checked the bathroom mirror. No it ain't!

Re:1984

[gweihir]

With a large extra serving of stupid on top, as this is not doable in the first place. Nobody can "remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data", unless they have the key. So they will probably make modern crypto illegal to use in the first place, pushing Britain back into the stone-age where it apparently belongs.

Re:1984

[cayenne8]

Just checked the calendar. It is 1984.

Yeah, someone needs to tell the "powers that be", that Orwells' novel 1984 was supposed to be an interesting work of fiction....not a fucking Guidline/Playbook/Manual for going forward in the future!!!

Re:1984

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Having left Europe, Britain is on the brink of leaving reality!

Certainly, of leaving the worlds of banking, finance and digital subscriber transactions.

Re:1984

[lgw]

Oh, no, no, you naive one. We're no where near peak dystopia. No where near.

no end-to-end no streaming media

[Anonymous Coward]

So how will things like netflix work without end to end encryption?
Does this mean the end of https and secure transactions?

Looks like, as usual, the politicians do not understand the technology.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[fustakrakich]

HTTPS? Hate to break the news to you. Internet security is an illusion.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[gweihir]

It would also mean the end of DRM, so the US will probably have to nuke Britain.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet security is not an illusion, but if the threat you care about is powerful enough, the CA system is just about the worst possible way to establish a basis of trust. Any CA can sign certs for any domain. If you have a powerful adversary that can co-opt a CA, you have a completely false sense of security. It's really easy to get users to trust rogue certs signed by real CAs, because it happens automatically with no user input!

Even worse, a less powerful adversary, like a browser maker or computer maker can undermine your system by installing trusted fraudulent root CA certs which should not be trusted to man-in-the-middle your TLS connections. Opera, Lenovo and Dell have all done this to name a few.

I work at a university, and to connect to the wireless, you need to "trust" a self-signed certificate. In some operating systems, you have to specifically follow some installation instructions for installing a cert manually, but on Windows and OS X, I think you just click "trust this certificate" and it pins the cert. I work in computer security (but in research, not IT). I have to explain this decision to many people who say it's insecure. Actually, it's more secure, because it forces even dumb users to pin a certificate that doesn't chain up to an public CA. Once you install the self-signed cert, it will warn you if it changes (I actually, don't know what the OS would say). This converts the certificate from the CA model to a trust-on-first-use (TOFU) model. Clearly the Uni's IT are no dummies.

TL;DR: I learned how terrible the CA system actually is in undergrad over 15 years ago. Only recently, however, has it become clear that powerful adversaries are seeming exploiting this weakness. I have no idea why there isn't more interest to actually change it, rather than just a lot of talk.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[Qzukk]

This converts the certificate from the CA model to a trust-on-first-use (TOFU) model.

It does not. It simply sets a flag saying you trust that certificate. If an attacker replaces it with a CA-signed certificate they control, then your computer will still trust that certificate under the CA model.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[Anubis IV]

If your ISP is a CSP, then this bill is impossible to enforce unless the ISPs either prevent encrypted packets from crossing their network or else they MITM their customers by intercepting packets during the handshake, posing as the customer, and then inserting themselves in all subsequent communications.

Of course, in your example, Netflix itself may be considered the CSP, in which case it already has the ability to provide all of the transmitted data, given that it's one of the parties to the end-to-end encryption. In which case the DRM would be protected just fine.

Mind you, I'm not suggesting that this is a good arrangement. I'm merely pointing out that these politicians are likely not offending their corporate overlords while they pursue their quest to save the children and protect us from threats that are far less dangerous than the ones we voluntarily choose for ourselves every single day we drive a car.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[Anubis IV]

And, almost immediately after hitting Submit, I realized I overgeneralized and misstated some simple facts regarding an ISP's ability to conduct a MITM attack. While they certainly are in the best position to do so, given that they are, by their very nature, a MITM, they can't actually insert themselves arbitrarily in an end-to-end encrypted communication, even if they are privy to all parts of the conversation including the handshake, for the simple reason that they don't hold the private keys for either of the intended parties, meaning that they lack the ability to decrypt the relevant messages.

That said, we have heard of cases where ISPs (I believe Verizon was caught doing it a few years back on mobile) intercept the handshake and strip necessary flags from it, thus dropping the connection to a less secure/insecure protocol that they are more than capable of reading. Granted, that basically breaks the encryption, but there are ways around that as well. For instance, an ISP could easily spoof the certificate authority to serve up their own credentials, or could even provide their own updates to the CA lists used by the major browsers so that their credentials would be recognized as valid for virtually any domain.

Granted, there are ways around such things (e.g. sneakernet in a valid CA list with their public keys), but they'd be able to cover a huge swath of the population with measures like those, and while it may take awhile to get up to speed, there's not much preventing a government from compelling ISPs to make use of tools of that sort.

Re: no end-to-end no streaming media

[Anubis IV]

Yeah, I overstated things a bit, unfortunately. Corrections and clarifications are in a followup post.

That said, they could just reject a packet if they're not capable of doing deep packet inspection on it. And for consumer-level (i.e. tier 3) ISPs, they'd be present for the handshake, meaning that they may be able to stop the encryption before it begins, which is something they've already been caught doing.

Re: no end-to-end no streaming media

[TechyImmigrant]

I have set up several servers serving random data. My job is making random data and making things that make random data.
If the government seized my computer and assumed the large random binary files on my disk were encrypted, they would be wrong. They are large random bit strings only.

Like this!"

Re: no end-to-end no streaming media

[TechyImmigrant]

Thank you for filling my server's disk.
I've limited the amount to 16 Mbytes so you can't do that.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[skids]

YMMV. It depends on the application and the implementation.

Modern Apple and Microsoft dot1x supplicants do pin on first use, but the only consequence of that is if someone spoofs a cert, the user gets a popup, and how they react to that depends on their training.

Android dot1x supplicants won't, and won't even allow you to pin a particular CA to limit exposure when using a public CA, nor even check the DN, so you are vulnerable to any old stolen key/certificate pair signed by a CA in the base OS trusted list.

If you set it up by hand, wpa-supplicant for Linux has the ability to pin either a particular cert or a CA/DN. Various GUI config tools may or may not support setting these options.

For IPSEC VPN, Windows supplicants cannot pin a CA/DN unless you use EAP-PEAP-MSCHAPv2 either for L2TP/IKEv1 or as the auth protocol in IKEv2, and it must be pinned manually or through a setup/install script. If you use EAP-MSCHAPv2/IKEv2 there is a check that DNS matches the DN, but that's not much extra security if your OS store includes a compromised CA, and Windows also cannot support DH groups higher than modp2048 in a RAS dialer, only in the decidedly user-unfriendly firewall policy feature set. Some 3rd-party VPN clients improve things slightly but often still play it loose with the store/validation. If installed through a mobileconfig, OSX and IOS do support locking things down, I think... that's next on my list of things to kick the tires on. Strongswan on linux pretty much kicks ass, once you've patched it up past the oopsie they had with the EAP state machine, but again, not an end-user-friendly animal so you are at the mercy of GUI tools to not be setting things up wrong.

The whole crypto landscape is a bit of a mess on the client side... the above doesn't really scratch the surface.

Re:no end-to-end no streaming media

[sjames]

Internet security is imperfect. However, in this case, the UK would have to have stolen the signing certs for all existing CAs to intercept all HTTPS without it becoming obvious.

When corporate gateways intercept HTTPS, they do it by installing a new CA cert in all the browsers and it is obvious.

Of course, if Netflix ships an app with a privately generated cert embedded in it, none of the above will work unless they get hacked too.

Idioits

[ITRambo]

Again, idiots in government finds new ways to turn law abiding citizens into criminals, or even terrorists.

Re:Idioits

[axewolf]

They aren't idiots....they do this on purpose at the bidding of their masters....stop making excuses for tyranny

My illusions have been shattered

[wcrowe]

This is so disappointing for an American. We Americans have always been a little insecure about our accents, our education level, etc, and we look at the British, with their smart-sounding accents, and their large vocabularies, and we just intrinsically KNOW that they are smarter than us. And then something like this happens that shatters our illusions, and tells us that British people can be just as dumb as anyone else.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[110010001000]

Any American who has actually been to the UK (or outside of the US) isn't surprised at all. Travel is good. It teaches you there are morons everywhere.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[110010001000]

Stop blaming racism for every decision that voters make you don't like. Idiots.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[fnj]

smart-sounding accents

Not everybody in the UK enunciates in Received Pronunciation like a BBC announcer. Nothing sounds any dumber than a Cockney accent, gov'ner. Midlands is pretty crazy too. Cornwall accent can be falling-down funny. If you're a devotee of Doc Martin, you just love the sound of it. Scottish English is truly to be savored; very difficult to comprehend though.

It isn't just the UK and USA that are separated by a common language. The UK is itself separated into fragments by a common language. Before you even get to Welsh and Scots.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[DeafAnchovy]

People have been on TV saying that they voted because of racism. Racist attacks have increased since the Referendum. Arsehole.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[phayes]

That there are UK racists who voted for brexit but that does not mean that everyone who voted for brexit is a racist. Many who oppose racism voted brexit to protest the former government and/or because Corbyn, the current Labor head thinks that he has a better chance at becoming PM without the rest of the EEC socialists telling everyone he's daft.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[110010001000]

That is why most leaders are psychopaths in my opinion. Political and corporate.

That's not how end-to-end encryption works

[Software]

Are they going to force Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla to add in British-government-controlled certificate authorities to their browsers distributed in the UK? Or force hardware vendors to provide access to decrypted data on end-users' machines? I don't think they've thought through how little control over the process CSPs have.

I'm also wondering - does the financial sector get a pass from these directives? If not, good luck keeping London as the de-facto headquarters for the financial sector in Europe. If so, I wonder how they plan to restrict encryption to only the financial center?

Re:That's not how end-to-end encryption works

[I4ko]

Eurasia and Oceania now have the same legislation like so

Re:That's not how end-to-end encryption works

[XXongo]

Are they going to force Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla to add in British-government-controlled certificate authorities to their browsers distributed in the UK? Or force hardware vendors to provide access to decrypted data on end-users' machines? I don't think they've thought through how little control over the process CSPs have.

The Russians have declared that they are going to be doing it. So, sure, why not the Brits?

(of course, we used to point to the Russians as the poster example of "no freedom." But that was then, this is now, and I guess that's changed, right? No more commies, so they must be free!)

I'm also wondering - does the financial sector get a pass from these directives? If not, good luck keeping London as the de-facto headquarters for the financial sector in Europe. If so, I wonder how they plan to restrict encryption to only the financial center?

Didn't you hear? The Brits voted to give up on having London as the financial center for Europe. That's what Brexit accomplishes, since there's no chance in hell that the Europeans will give Britain the financial access to European markets if Britain leaves.

Re:That's not how end-to-end encryption works

[bhetrick]

No. Read up on how the Great Firewall of China works. If the client requests a secure connection, and doesn't accept a certificate signed by the State MITM Attacker (claiming to be the connection target, if necessary generated on the fly) the connection goes no further. It's actually quite simple.

It can be worked around by letting the State MITM the connection with a proxy, then using real security for the connection through the proxy. Don't get discovered, though: doing this is terrorism. And proxies as they are discovered turn into honeypots leading to more terrorists. Your continued freedom depends on the operational security of everyone using the proxy, and on luck besides.

Re:That's not how end-to-end encryption works

[cdrudge]

The Russians have declared that they are going to be doing it. So, sure, why not the Brits?

It'll be fun watching the Brits and Russia fight it out while each trying to be secure since both are essentially demanding the keys for everything.

Not possible

[SmilingBoy]

If someone like an ISP can remove an encryption, it is not end-to-end encryption in the first place.

Re:Not possible

[bluefoxlucid]

TLS has unique challenges in this regard.

In theory, a hostile Government can pressure the CA to provide a signature for a MITM certificate, although this is transparent (it's easily discovered if that certificate is ever revoked, and identifiable if the old certificate is known).

A hostile Government can pressure the end provider (e.g. Google) to submit their Private key, thus breaking TLS: the Client asks the Server for its Certificate, then uses that Certificate to dictate a session key (and client certificate) to the Server. A passive eavesdropper with the server's Private Key can decrypt this exchange.

The best I can come up with is the Client sends the Server a random public key, and the Server sends the Client a session key; then the hostile Government must use a MITM to break it. A passive eavesdropper can be stopped, but an active MITM can't.

Your endpoints have to be non-hostile for end-to-end encryption to work. If they're infiltrated, it doesn't work.

Re:Not possible

[bluefoxlucid]

If you have the private key, you can listen in on encryption. If you do some monkey business in the protocol, you can make a passive eaves drop impossible even in this situation; in which case, if you have the private key, you can insert yourself in the network path and mediate the conversation, thus accessing the plaintext while posing as the end server in a way the client is 100% incapable of identifying and unable to mitigate.

Having one end hand over the keys does, in fact, completely remove end-to-end encryption for that eavesdropper.

Re:Welp...

[Jawnn]

... so much for anybody ever using a British ISP for anything. Aren't "conservatives" supposed to support corporate interests, instead of killing businesses outright?

Yes, but they're also supposed to be almost completely clueless when it comes to "all that computer stuff", so a little "mixed messaging" is to be expected.

Expect Wider Use of OTPs

[ytene]

We already know, as a result of the US finding Osama Bin Laden, than those absolutely determined to do harm can find away around any time of security measures imposed by governments. So ultimately this will not target the factions in our world that are habitually used to justify draconian controls. On the other hand, the imposition of one new control often prompts society to respond by developing alternate solutions. Breaking end-to-end encryption might be viable when entities use the same master keys over and over [i.e. the certificates used to set up SSL encryption through the asynchronous handshake during the session setup. However, this is only one means by which encryption can be activated. Suppose 2 people want to use secure communications. They create an application that generates strings of random numbers which are printed on rice paper. Each person gets one identical copy of the booklet. Then, each time they want to set up secure communications, they use the next number on the pad. The moment the number is used, they eat that sheet of paper [hence use of rice paper]. As a technique it's not foolproof, but it would require physical access to one of the pads. If a session protocol was agreed that required each participant to disclose a key piece of information [securely, after setup] then each party would have a reasonable expectation of the identity of the other... In other words, those who are determined to do the most harm to society will find a way to defeat this, whilst those who may be vulnerable to political interference, may be the most vulnerable. And yes, we could absolutely say, "Hang on, the UK doesn't victimise those with differing political views as long as they are peaceful" [and would be quite correct] but it's the danger of the approach being used elsewhere that would concern me. Well, that and the fact that this is another example of the presumption of innocence being disregarded...

Mindlessly unenforceable

[RandCraw]

This law would require dispensations for credit cards, banks, point of sale software, (the government itself), and many more infrastructural e-orgs that cannot function without encryption.

It would also require makers of cell phones that encrypt, Facebook (soon), and increasinly many e-firms to recognize any device/account as being ENGLISH so that it can selectively stomp all over those peoples' freedoms.

It will also generate an *ungodfy* large amount of data that will swamp the GCHQ's resources and waste their time sifting through zottabytes of drivel, since BAD GUYS DON"T CHAT ON THE PHONE.

This policy is so halfass and dumbass that it'll be impossible to enforce.

This won't wash

[Billy the Mountain]

Let's say I am an ISP and I have a data stream coming through my system. How do I know if the data is encrypted or not? Data is data. Neither IP nor UDP packets have an 'encrypted data' indicator. How would we differentiate between an encrypted data stream and a video stream in a new movie format? What's the difference between decrypting vs displaying a movie? Both processes are a conversion operation being performed on a data stream.

Re:This won't wash

[geek]

Let's say I am an ISP and I have a data stream coming through my system. How do I know if the data is encrypted or not? Data is data. Neither IP nor UDP packets have an 'encrypted data' indicator.

How would we differentiate between an encrypted data stream and a video stream in a new movie format? What's the difference between decrypting vs displaying a movie? Both processes are a conversion operation being performed on a data stream.

Simple. Packet capture and look for the key exchange. I do this daily.

Re:This won't wash

[geek]

How would we differentiate between an encrypted data stream and a video stream in a new movie format? What's the difference between decrypting vs displaying a movie? Both processes are a conversion operation being performed on a data stream.

Simple. Packet capture and look for the key exchange. I do this daily.

Dunno if you are trying to be funny or are just a complete idiot. There's no need whatsoever for "key exchange" when I send an encrypted message to my broker in the Caymans. He has the decryption software and password. NOthing but the message is transmitted.

See also PGP.

That's nice. Also totally unrelated to what the GP asked.

"performed on a data stream"

The power to ban mathematics?

[mark-t]

Because truthfully, that us what they are proposing. The banning of any mathematics where the formulas involved are both unknown and cannot trivially be reverse engineered.

Just...wow...

[MitchDev]

I know England longs for the good old days when it thought it ruled the world, but they're proposing a giant leap backwards to the stone age....

The "Extinction Event" Asteroid can't hit fast enough at this pace or rising government fascism around the world...

No changes wrt. RIPA 2000

[doru]

The government also says (on page 39) that the new law provides nothing more than what is already present in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000). It specifically refers to "the ability to remove any encryption applied by the CSP to whom the notice relates" (my emphasis), and not to end-to-end encryption.

How about a plug-in architecture

[presidenteloco]

Browser makers should just allow encryption plug-ins/extensions (just like they allow other extensions).
That way the browser maker is not responsible for the encryption and has no backdoor to it.

Re:Good luck with that?

[Grishnakh]

What exactly do they think an ISP is going to be able to do if the data is already encrypted when it hits their network?

Simple: they legislate that the ISP has to decrypt it.

It's not much different than the US state government which legislated the Pi equals 3.

Re:UK and CHINA

[sunderland56]

Is it the same country?

No. China has decent food.

Truer than you realize ....

[whoever57]

The admission follows Theresa May's confession last November that, since the turn of the millennium, secretaries of state have been issuing secret directions under section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, without any judicial authorisation.

Let me tell you exactly how long this will last:

[kheldan]

(Assuming, of course, they completely banned encryption, which is about the only way they could have delivered to them what they're demanding)

This will last precisely as long as it takes for the first time the UK Home Secretary gets their bank account drained, or identity stolen, because there was no effective encryption on the very much public Internet to protect their very much private and personal data from criminals. Furthermore, I can see how legislation like this would actually increase the likelihood of terrorism; terrorists often use profits from criminal activities as operating funds; removing (or crippling) encryption on the Internet will allow them to commit cybercrimes with relative ease, thus increasing their operating funds that much more.

Of course, policitians being the duplicitous creatures they are, they -- and the rich, no doubt -- will create loopholes allowing them to posess and use full, non-crippled encryption -- for 'security purposes', of course -- and the common citizens can go fuck themselves, so far as they're concerned.

Nice job, UK. Don't you dare mock and make jokes about American politics, not when your own political system and government are at least as much of a bloody bollixed-up mess as ours, if not more so.

MEMO TO UK POLITICIANS: Go take some gods-be-damned basic computer science courses, will you? Because you have NO IDEA what the hell you're doing!

ssh?

[whitroth]

So, he's going to order ssh banned from the UK? Really?

Wonder how their MoD will respond to that. Or *any* large company.....

              mark