Political and law enforcement leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom have called for Internet systems to be redesigned to ensure government access to information — even encrypted information. They argue that the growing use of encryption will neutralize their investigative capabilities. They propose that data storage and communications systems must be designed for exceptional access by law enforcement agencies. These proposals are unworkable in practice, raise enormous legal and ethical questions, and would undo progress on security at a time when Internet vulnerabilities are causing extreme economic harm.
- Providing exceptional access to communications would force a U-turn from the best practices now being deployed to make the Internet more secure.
- Building in exceptional access would substantially increase system complexity.
- Exceptional access would create concentrated targets that could attract bad actors.
Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications
by Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matthew Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Peter G. Neumann, Susan Landau, Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, Daniel J. Weitzner
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-026.pdf?sequence=6
Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels “going dark,” these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.
We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.
Why a Back Door to the Internet Is a Bad Idea
by Vikas Bajaj
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/why-a-back-door-to-the-internet-is-a-bad-idea/
In recent months top American and British political leaders have been arguing that there should be no encrypted communication system that they cannot unlock whenever they deem it necessary to do so. Officials like the director of the National Security Agency, Michael Rogers, and Prime Minister David Cameron have said that unless technology companies grant them the technical equivalent of a back door to snoop on encrypted communications, the world’s bad guys will “go dark” and become untraceable.
Now, 13 prominent encryption and information security experts have responded with an important report that explains in plain English why what Mr. Rogers and Mr. Cameron are asking for would be terrible for the Internet.
To start, giving governments back-door access to encrypted technologies like email servers, video chats, online banking services and so on would make those systems much more vulnerable to hacking. Furthermore, giving encryption keys to governments would increase the risk of those keys being stolen by criminals and spies from other countries.
There is yet another big problem: How should technology companies decide which governments they should give back-door access to? If the United States and Britain have access to, say, all of Google’s encrypted servers, the governments of China, Russia and many other nations will surely demand similar privileges. Or should Western tech companies simply stop doing business in some foreign countries?
This is hardly a new debate. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration proposed requiring the tech industry to use the Clipper chip, a device that would help the government decrypt communications. Businesses, technical experts and civil liberties groups defeated that effort by showing that hackers and criminals could easily exploit that system.
Not having such an invasive back door into Internet-based communications systems has hardly hurt the government’s ability to conduct surveillance. In fact, Edward Snowden revealed that American and British agencies have had extensive access to our communications for years. If anybody has been kept in the dark, it is ordinary citizens.