Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity Experts Against Government Access to Encryption

July 14, 2015

The New York Times reported last week that a formidable group of security experts has concluded that the U.S. and U.K. governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. Amen to that.

A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, provides a formidable rebuff to intelligence and law enforcement leaders, who argue that encryption threatens to thwart their ability to monitor terrorists and other criminals.

Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to ban encrypted messages altogether. In the United States, Michael S. Rogers, the director of the NSA, proposed that technology companies be required to create a digital key to unlock encrypted data, but to divide the key into pieces and secure it so that no one person or government agency could use it alone.

The new paper is the first in-depth technical analysis of government proposals by leading cryptographers and security thinkers, including Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer of public key cryptography, and Ronald L. Rivest, the “R” in the widely used RSA public cryptography algorithm. In the report, the group said any effort to give the government “exceptional access” to encrypted communications was technically unfeasible (you'll have to read the paper to understand why) and would leave confidential data and critical infrastructure like banks and the power grid at risk.

Handing governments a key to encrypted communications would also require an extraordinary degree of trust. With government agency breaches a regular occurrence, the security specialists said authorities could not be trusted to keep such keys safe from hackers and criminals. They added that if the U.S. and the U.K. mandated backdoor keys to communications, China and other governments would do the same.

No doubt they would. I am glad that such a top drawer collection of scientists joined forces to oppose this misguided attempt to defeat encryption.

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