Monday, November 2, 2015

You Cannot Escape the Big Eye

From the UK:
Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.

[...]

On its website, Apple promotes the fact that it has, for example, “no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data when it’s in transit between devices”.

It adds: “So unlike other companies’ messaging services, Apple doesn’t scan your communications, and we wouldn’t be able to comply with a wiretap order even if we wanted to.”

[...]

Ministers have no plans to ban encryption services because they have an important role in the protection of legitimate online activity such as banking and personal data.

  UK Telegraph
I call bullshit on that. If they are mandating encryption that can be broken, they are effectively banning encryption.

I don't know how this affects the rest of the world if implemented, but we're at the same point here where Ladar Levison shut down his US company (Lavabit: encrypted email services) rather than comply with a similar demand from the FBI. I'm sure Apple won't be folding.
British police already have the power to compel someone to disclose cryptographic keys under RIPA (i.e., to order decryption on provision of a warrant).

[...]

Where a corporat[ion] such as Apple, Google, or WhatsApp knows about or engineers a weakness in encryption, this will allow an attacker to utilise and take advantage of that same weakness, no matter who that attacker is. Whether it be the service of a warrant by the home secretary, a foreign state, a terrorist, or that most insidious of threats, a bored teen-ager, all are equal before the eyes of mathematics.

  Weia Industries
Indeed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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