#Facepalm — what we really don’t need right now is somebody trying to reboot failed 1997 Key Escrow, e.g. like in this letter to the @FT
This is disappointing, misconceived, and woefully repetitious of some nonsense which we last (?) saw back in 1996/ish when secret-sharing was still relatively new, cool & trendy.
In case you’re not familiar: this proposal (a) will not scale to meet demand nor growth (b) is in any case an illiberal imposition, (c) breaks Ranum’s Law by attempting to technically bodge around a social problem, (d) will not be deployable globally because there is no such thing (and likely never will be) as global consensus on how to build a backdoor; not to mention (e) will doubtless be circumvented by motivated actors — because it can be.
This is a distraction at the time we least need one. At least we can be grateful that Andersen didn’t suggest putting the escrow onto the blockchain.
Letter: Here’s the democratic key to the encryption backdoor
From Andersen Cheng, Founder and Executive Chairman, Post-Quantum, London SE1, UK
Several encrypted messaging services, including Signal and WhatsApp, recently signed an open letter criticising UK government plans for an encryption backdoor, a method by which authorised and unauthorised users are able to get around normal security measures. They cited concerns around government surveillance and weakened security.
Separately, the FBI, Interpol and the UK National Crime Agency, in a statement about Meta, argued that encryption allows crimes to occur, such as child sex abuse (Report, April 20).
Clearly, a government backdoor infringes on personal privacy and a backdoor for one is a backdoor for all. This used to summarise our entire position, and that’s why we set up the world’s first quantum-safe encrypted messaging service in 2014. Our app was successful in keeping messages secure, but we soon found out this had made it a recommended tool for Isis. Without hesitation, we shut the otherwise very successful app down.
If a backdoor compromises security, but full end-to-end encryption makes investigations impossible for law enforcement agencies, surely there’s a middle ground?
What law enforcement agencies, the government and platforms all miss is the options that thread this fine needle — encryption key splitting. This allows governments, courts, external watchdog or any combination of actors to have one encryption key split between them so that a specific threshold is required for very restricted access.
Users will still have secure data, but if the government would like to access a message it would have to gain approval, perhaps from “fragment guardians” who hold part of the encryption key such as courts or external privacy watchdogs. Both sides make valid points, but the middle ground and cryptographically provable technology is already available and waiting to help settle the debate.
Andersen Cheng
Founder and Executive Chairman Post-Quantum, London SE1, UK
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