<story><title>Senator asks FBI director to name the cryptographers who support backdoors</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/senator-demands-fbi-director-explain-his-encryption-bac-1822400040</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cvwright</author><text>Hi!  Nice to meet you.&lt;p&gt;I think (some of) what the FBI is asking for lately is actually not that unreasonable -- assuming we could do it right.  Chris Wray, like Comey before him, is &lt;i&gt;claiming&lt;/i&gt; that they only need a way to get into a few selected devices in &amp;quot;exceptional&amp;quot; circumstances for criminal investigations.  Whenever the FBI&amp;#x2F;DOJ guys argue this point, they also make sure to say nice things about the value of encryption for protecting the public.&lt;p&gt;Do they really believe the nice things they say?  I have no idea, but for now I&amp;#x27;m willing to take them at their word for the sake of the debate.&lt;p&gt;Do they really want only a limited ability to access encrypted data?  Again, I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;But suppose we could construct a truly limited mechanism that would give them the ability to recover only a small amount of encrypted data.  Then we could call their bluff.  If they still want more, they&amp;#x27;d have to make the case to the public that they should have the all-seeing power that our community claims they&amp;#x27;re trying to get.&lt;p&gt;We have some early work along these lines.  I gave a talk about it at Enigma last week.  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usenix.org&amp;#x2F;conference&amp;#x2F;enigma2018&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;wright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usenix.org&amp;#x2F;conference&amp;#x2F;enigma2018&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;wr...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>benchaney</author><text>I have never met anyone who understands what cryptography is, and supports the FBI. As far as I can tell, the only reason they have any support at all is because they confuse people and muddy the waters.&lt;p&gt;Edit: What I meant by &amp;quot;supports the FBI&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;supports the FBI on this issue&amp;quot;. If you understand encryption and support the FBI in a general sense, but think they are wrong on this issue, then you aren&amp;#x27;t a counterpoint.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jobu</author><text>From your link:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;And so the public policy debate around encryption has been framed as a binary choice between two absolutist positions: either we allow law enforcement no access at all to encrypted data, or we must effectively give them complete, unrestricted access to all our communications&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most people support giving some level of data access to law enforcement, but the problem is that there&amp;#x27;s no way to restrict it to just law enforcement. As soon as we give one person or group access to the data, then we&amp;#x27;ve effectively given everyone access to that data.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there was more in the presentation, but this is the only idea I see in the slides:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Idea: Make brute force key recovery possible but very expensive&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, that assumes governments that actually follow rule of law, but any criminal is going to use stolen credit cards to rent for servers in the cloud (or a hacked bot farm) and crack that encryption at no cost to themselves.</text></comment>
<story><title>Senator asks FBI director to name the cryptographers who support backdoors</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/senator-demands-fbi-director-explain-his-encryption-bac-1822400040</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cvwright</author><text>Hi!  Nice to meet you.&lt;p&gt;I think (some of) what the FBI is asking for lately is actually not that unreasonable -- assuming we could do it right.  Chris Wray, like Comey before him, is &lt;i&gt;claiming&lt;/i&gt; that they only need a way to get into a few selected devices in &amp;quot;exceptional&amp;quot; circumstances for criminal investigations.  Whenever the FBI&amp;#x2F;DOJ guys argue this point, they also make sure to say nice things about the value of encryption for protecting the public.&lt;p&gt;Do they really believe the nice things they say?  I have no idea, but for now I&amp;#x27;m willing to take them at their word for the sake of the debate.&lt;p&gt;Do they really want only a limited ability to access encrypted data?  Again, I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;But suppose we could construct a truly limited mechanism that would give them the ability to recover only a small amount of encrypted data.  Then we could call their bluff.  If they still want more, they&amp;#x27;d have to make the case to the public that they should have the all-seeing power that our community claims they&amp;#x27;re trying to get.&lt;p&gt;We have some early work along these lines.  I gave a talk about it at Enigma last week.  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usenix.org&amp;#x2F;conference&amp;#x2F;enigma2018&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;wright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usenix.org&amp;#x2F;conference&amp;#x2F;enigma2018&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;wr...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>benchaney</author><text>I have never met anyone who understands what cryptography is, and supports the FBI. As far as I can tell, the only reason they have any support at all is because they confuse people and muddy the waters.&lt;p&gt;Edit: What I meant by &amp;quot;supports the FBI&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;supports the FBI on this issue&amp;quot;. If you understand encryption and support the FBI in a general sense, but think they are wrong on this issue, then you aren&amp;#x27;t a counterpoint.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SheinhardtWigCo</author><text>Your talk was excellent, kudos to you for being willing to present a controversial idea to an audience that is instinctively hostile to any intentional weakening of crypto. It was certainly a hot topic at lunch.&lt;p&gt;My primary concern and others’ was that strong crypto is already out there and can’t ever be taken away. I understand that you’re choosing to hand-wave over this for the sake of bringing a novel idea to the table, but I’d say it’s a fundamental flaw that can only be addressed by not only outlawing strong crypto in every country, but also finding a way to prevent criminals from implementing and using algorithms that have been known for a while now. That seems, to say the least, quite hard.</text></comment>