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The criticism of strong-encryption by law-enforcement has been an interesting topic to follow in the news and politics for the last nine months. It became even more interesting in February when the short-lived court battle between Apple and the FBI made headlines. Now looming on the horizons is a piece of legislation that proposes to give judges the authority to order makers of products with encryption to help law-enforcement.
Why can’t these companies help law-enforcement and give them a backdoor that they can only get the keys with a court order?
A Word about Encryption
Message encryption has existed for millennia, primarily used for communication in the military. It is now a ubiquitous tool of the Information Age and the Internet. Encryption is a versatile tool that goes well beyond privacy services such as online banking, the protection of personal medical records or even the end-to-end message encryption recently added to WhatsApp. Encryption techniques are also used to create digital signatures to verify our digital content has not been tampered. Both aspects are fundamental to computer security.
How does encryption work?
Math is Hard
Specifically, for a computer to efficiently factor extremely large integers and to compute discrete logarithms. These problems are considered “intractable” or hard to deal with. They are difficult problems that cannot be solved quickly. Other types of encryption rely on concepts learned from information theory, computational complexity and statistics.
Essentially, an encryption algorithm is a set of instructions that scramble a plain-text message so there is no discernable pattern. Statistically, it should look like a truly random sequence of numbers, noise. The scrambled message is called a cipher message. There is also an algorithm that is used to decrypt the cipher message.
To make encryption algorithms more useful, a key is used with the algorithm to modify the scrambling instructions in a way that is unique to each key.
It takes relatively little time for a computer to encode and decode a message with an encryption algorithm and the associated key. However, the intractable math problems and encryption concepts used to design the algorithm make decryption take a very long time without the key.
This reddit comment [^] calculates the time required to crack an AES 256-bit message at 9 e50 years. To put this in perspective, the universe is believed to be 14 billion (1.4 e10) years old.
What’s the take-away from all of this?
It is far simpler and faster to search for a vulnerability in the system that employs encryption than it is to attempt to brute-force crack a message.
Well, demanding that a backdoor be engineered into products that are normally secure is also faster and simpler than a brute-force attack.
Why Can't We Give Them a Backdoor?
Vulnerabilities are regularly discovered in computer systems. The chances are that there are vulnerabilities in the system. It may not be with the encryption algorithm itself, but it may be with how the keys are transferred, or how the data is copied. Creating a secure system is difficult even when we aren’t trying to create backdoors in the system.
In fact, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD)[^] reports an average of 19 new vulnerabilities were reported each day in 2014. At the time of this writing, NVD vulnerability workload index workload index[^] was 4.62. This is a calculation of the number of important vulnerabilities that information technology operations staff need to address each day.
It seems as though there is no need for a backdoor.
Now these vulnerabilities are spread across a wide variety of networked systems, software and devices. So it is not likely that a new vulnerability is discovered for your iPhone or Android device each day. Moreover, it is likely that many vulnerabilities only become exploitable when you combine two specific systems configured in specific way. Otherwise they would be considered to be secure by themselves.
It is difficult enough to secure the systems that we have when we intend for them to be 100% secure. Imagine what happens when we start adding secret access methods to these designs. Once the secret access method is uncovered by less than honorable groups, the secret access feature becomes the front door… with no locks … a huge welcome mat out front… and a note on the door that says “Let yourself in and make yourself comfortable.”
Summary
So, we actually can add backdoors to these products, but that defeats the purpose of trying to secure a product in the first place. Networked computers cannot communicate securely over a public network without encryption. Adding an alternate method to access a computer that bypasses strong-encryption is not an acceptable solution.
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