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And now are we going to have a discussion
about the crypto wars, which is this
ongoing conflict, about the fact that
some governments seem to be very
insistent on not allowing people
to encrypt the data?
But luckily, there's some people fighting
against them. And among them there's the
electronic frontier, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, the EFF.
Yeah, thank you.
Which apparently also dabbles in
publishing, I don't know if you noticed
as they released a book, a
science fiction collection recently.
It's really strange, but it's a very good
collection. You should read it.
And now, please welcome
Scott Opsahl from the EFSF.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Is my name is Kurt Opsahl,
I'm the deputy executive director and
general counsel, Electronic Frontier
Foundation.
It's great pleasure to be back here at
C.C.C.. And thank you all for
for coming. I know it's a little early in
the day, so thank you for making the
effort to come here today.
We're going to talk about the crypto
wars, what we call part two,
the crypto wars. Part one was
about 20 years ago
and now it's back.
And we fought pretty hard back then
against attempts to limit, suppress and
cripple encryption.
My organization, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, was on the front lines
fighting throughout the 90s to
help preserve the ability for people to
use, develop and publish strong
encryption.
It was a long struggle, took many years.
But finally, by by the end of the 90s,
encryption prevailed.
And we thought, at least for a time,
we would have the freedom to continue to
use the strongest encryption as we
possibly could.
But now the governments are at it
again.
They come back to try and weaken
or destroy crypto, make it harder to use.
So today we're going to talk about a
little bit of the history
going back to the original crypto
wars, a little bit about what governments
are now doing to try and reignite
those wars.
And then some of the the arguments
that you can make to help fight back
and preserve your access to strong
encryption.
So we'll start with a bit of the
background.
You know, in the earlier times,
you know, through the Cold War, even
before encryption was generally
considered to be a military technology.
Not always. I mean, there was actually
a commercial version of the Enigma
machine in the 1920s
and 30s.
But by and large, it was
used most commonly in the military and
thought of as a military technology
by about the 70s
that came out with the standard of the
data encryption standard disks.
And this started to popularize
encryption to start to be used more
frequently.
It also sort of help
jumpstart some of the fields of crypto
analysis. There was an algorithm that
people could start to look at and
intensely try to see if there were flaws.
Turned out there were some flaws, but we
didn't find that out till till later.
In the late 70s, RSA
found a way to implement the Diffie
Hellman public key exchange.
This was a great advance in technology
allowing people to send encrypted
communications when they weren't
able to
have a side channel to exchange the key.
This was very important in the
development of cryptography.
By the early 90s, we had
the pretty good privacy and email
encryption program that most of you are
probably familiar with, allowing
people to have ended encrypted email
communications.
And by the mid 90s we had
secured socket layer introduced by
the Netscape for its Navigator
browser program, allowing servers
to communicate with encryption and
authentication between the server
and the browser.
But this presented some some challenges,
and one of those challenges was
what is what does the munition?
So I have up on the screen two types of
munitions on the right, a more familiar
one, the tank, which
has export controls.
And many people will find that sensible,
that before you're going to ship a tank
to people, you should, I know, know
what you're doing.
And on the on the left, we have
the Netscape Navigator.
This is the the international version
approved for export.
And at the time,
the standard for encryption was 128
bit secure and socket layer
for the domestic version, while the
international the export version
was limited to 40
bit encryption, which
turns out could be could be broken in
days. And the idea behind this limitation
was in part to make sure that
organizations like the the NSA
could easily break the encryption, that
we weren't exporting something that
couldn't be broken by our security
services.
But this this created some sort of, you
know, relative craziness.
That encryption
that was developed overseas
could be stronger.
Cryptography conferences are to be held
in places like Caribbean islands
to get around these encryption.
And there were some legal challenges to
these export regulations.
Now, one of the legacies that
came out of these export
grade encryption we just saw actually
this year illustrated
through the freak and logjam attacks.
I'm going to talk about this very
briefly. There was actually a great
session yesterday from
Alex Halderman and not a Hettinger to go
through them in great detail.
I suggest you watch that if you haven't
already.
But the the takeaway from this for
for the crypto wars was that the
legacy of export grade encryption
persisted 20 years later
so that people were able to convince
browsers service to downgrade
to the export grade keys, which
were designed to allow the
NSA to be able to break them.
But it didn't really have the foresight
to think about how much computing power
would change over the years.
So perhaps in the
1990s, when they were trying to come up
with these export grade levels,
they thought that, well, only only the
NSA would have the computing power to do
this. And so this was a wise
idea, but it turned out not to be a very
wise idea.
Twenty years later, when you can go on
to Amazon and for
75 dollars and a couple of hours of
time, be able to break some of these
export grade encryptions.
So we're still having sort of casualties
from the first crypto
wars today.
During the 90s there, we had a
challenger, Dan Bernstein,
challenge export control of his snuffle
crypto program.
This was a case that the FBI helped and
took it to the courts and
had some success.
The courts determined that code
was speech, that this was a free
expression, protected act that
you could publish.
You're the source code.
You could publish your algorithms.
And there shouldn't be treated
as a munition, but rather
thought of as speech.
And out of the the appeal from that case,
we had a great quote that that came from
the court showing that the courts were
recognizing both the freedom of
expression rights here, but also
the privacy value that
they recognized that the availability of
strong encryption would help people
protect their privacy, implicating not
only First Amendment rights,
but their thinking about the right to
receive information as recipients of
encryptions bounty.
So this was a very strong blow
that helped enable
encryption moving forward.
Another legacy of the 90s.
It was the Clipper chip.
This was a chip set.
It was designed for voice communications
to encrypt voice communications
with skipjack encryption
algorithm.
And then it included a back door
with a key that was
supposed to be placed in escrow
so that when the government came
knocking, they could get the escrowed
key, decrypt the communications
and find out what people said.
And they wanted to have people install
this chip on all their phones.
And we and many others
pointed out to them back doors can be
very dangerous.
Even a small flaw in
a crypto system can ultimately
end up being disastrous.
And as it turned out, the Clippers
did have some flaws.
By the 1994, Matt Blaze
was able to determine
that the law enforcement access
field contained in the information
needed to recover the key.
So this made the key escrow,
not just a back door for the NSA,
but a back door to for other people to
access, as well
as later an attack that was able to
bypass the escrow.
So Kliper ended up being widely condemned
and eventually was
sort of universally considered to be a
bad idea.
So when we look back over
the 1990s, policy debate
is actually very eerily similar
to today, a lot of the same talking
points are being used, a lot
of the same arguments,
for example. And they're actually many
examples. I'm just going to pick a few.
But in 1997,
the director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation said
strong encryption. It's great.
We love it.
We just want to make sure that there's a
key that's available so that we can get
access to it.
Fast forward to the 2000s
and the FBI's general counsel
says, yeah, great strong encryption,
but they just need to be able to find a
way to give us the plain text.
So we're considering the the sort of
same rhetoric that
they realized that perhaps saying we
want weak encryption doesn't sound right.
People are people not receptive to that.
So they say great, strong encryption.
We're all for it.
It just has to have a giant hole in it.
So what happened in the in
the 2010s that brought this
the second round of the crypto wars?
Why the why did the government sort of
start attacking encryption again?
The major shift is the
development of widespread encryption.
The key event that really started off
government rhetoric came around the time
that that first Apple and shortly
thereafter, Google said that they were
going to have encryption on
their phones for the for the data stored
on the phone that they couldn't
unlock at the government's request.
So, for example, with iOS seven
and before it had encryption on
there. But if you sent the phone in to
Apple and, you know, brought a warrant
and such, that Apple could
unlock the phone, get access to the
information.
And they said, well, with the new iOS
eight and later they wouldn't be able to
do that, that the only the user
would be able to unlock their their
phones.
At the same time, more and more
commonplace messaging apps started
to have encryption.
I message was one of the early things
actually since the beginning of my
message. It had opportunistic
encryption. So if it was
a text sent from an iPhone to an iPhone,
it would use a message and encrypt
the message.
There also became the text secure
became popularized for Android.
WhatsApp, one of the most popular
communication tools out there with a
at least a billion users.
It started out being unencrypted,
but has started to work with
open whisper systems to add encryption
and encrypt communications of billions of
users.
And this is bringing about more
ubiquitous encryption.
So things that had previously been
limited to more technically sophisticated
users are relatively rare,
something that when you know, when you
look at some of the Snowden documents,
they talk about encryption being used
as a flag to say, well, this is
interesting because it's encrypted
or they say, you know, we will store
encrypted communications until such time
as we're able to decrypt them.
But as more and more communications will
be encrypted, where it was becoming less
unusual, less rare,
this started to become something very
worrisome for the government.
So it started out as
as I said, from the announcements
of having strong encryption
without the ability for companies to
unlock for mobile phones.
Though the conversation quickly moved to
talking about end to end encryption
as a problem, the
prime minister of the United Kingdom,
Cameron, asked rhetorically,
are we going to allow a means of
communication which simply isn't possible
to read? And his answer, of course, was
was no, not if he has his way.
He doesn't want there to be a private
space where you can communicate without
having the government able to look over
your shoulder that there should be no
place to hide.
So they started to strike back
and using some of the tools that we
remember from the first crypto wars,
public and private pressure on the
companies who are supplying these
technologies, public rhetoric
to try and demonize encryption, make it
look bad for the public,
and then by changing that atmosphere,
try and create a more ripe situation for
legislation.
And of course, at the same time, the
the NSA, the JQ
intelligence agencies are working
to use technical attacks
to try to weaken or defeat encryption.
So a lot of the public pressure is on
there. I mean, you know, the FBI director
asks, you know, why would you market
something to allow people to place
themselves beyond the law?
And this is sort of a way of twisting the
conversation, you know, not asking,
you know, why would someone want to have
something that would protect people from
oppressive regimes or would it give them
a private space or allow for
a secure e-commerce?
But sort of discussing this as something
that is only purpose is
to enable criminal activities.
And Cameron to putting the pressure on
saying that companies have a
responsibility to fight terrorism.
And if they you know, if they care if
they're patriotic, they will do as I say
and put in these back doors, put in these
governments ability.
And they're doing this also hard to focus
on the companies with large user
bases saying before
the thing that I was really scared, the
government is sort of the widespread
by default availability of encryption.
So they're trying to get that switched
off for the large companies,
relegating encryption back to
a relatively rare thing that
can be used for for targeting.
They're also trying to be dismissive
of the companies
saying, well, it's only a business model.
It's it's not a technical feature.
It is a marketing pitch.
Well, in some sense, you know, that that
that I think that's great.
Strong encryption should be a marketing
pitch, should be a reason why you're
providing providing the product
to a willing audience.
But it is more than that.
It's also something of principle.
And they're trying to remove the
principle and try and
dismiss the companies as being only
profit motivated.
So they're what they call some
proposals for secure back doors,
and this seems like a contradiction in
terms or a misnomer,
but nevertheless there but a lot of
proposals out there, the most common
is key escrow.
This notion that you have a message
that is sent with a symmetric key, you
encrypt that key twice, once
to the recipients, and they can decrypted
and read it. The escrow agent gets a
copy that is stored so
that at some point later, if they want
to get it, they can get it from the
escrow. Use that key,
read the message.
But this has a number of problems.
If the escrow agents private key
is compromised, it breaks the whole
system. They will be able to use that key
to go back and get messages
for well, as many people as that key
can can unlock.
So it creates a point of failure.
And then if you're using a single
escrow, this can break forward secrecy,
a property that is very useful for
creating strong encryption.
It's a recommended property that I think
we want to have as widespread
as possible.
But if the whole design is to allow
it so that somebody at any point
can get the escrow key,
go back and read all the messages in the
past, this is sort of defeating the point
of forward
secrecy.
Now, you can mitigate some of these
things. Some proposals have talked about
split keys so
that you might have to get more than one
key in order to get it from
the escrow agent.
And, you know, this this adds some
mitigation so that you have to
compromise a couple of different places
to move forward. But all of these things
add complexity and complexity
is the enemy of security.
For every complexity you're adding,
you're making a larger attack surface.
You are creating additional possibilities
for vulnerabilities.
Also, with any case of of an escrow
agent, you have some questions
arise. Who would be that escrow?
Would the government be in escrow
then? If so, how do you pick which
government or which government gets
access to the escrow?
Should the provider be the escrow?
Should we have a trusted third party?
And for any of the escrows, they're
often not in a position to raise the
important concerns that we might want
to be have handled. For example, if we've
decided that certain communications are
privileged like an attorney client
communication, none of these escrows
are in a position to know
that this is a privileged communication
to raise that concern and
failed, you know, resist providing and
challenge the acquisition.
If you have an escrow, you also introduce
insider risk.
The possibility that someone who's
working at the escrow agent is familiar
with its practices can do something
that would make it appear like they have
a legitimate request that
has come through the proper channels and
then use that to to gain access
to the previously
private communications.
And we have a bit of a history to look
back on why this can be problematic
with law enforcement access points.
So there have been a number
of attacks on law enforcement
access points.
Some become a tempting target
for criminals, for state sponsored
attackers.
We look at the example of the wiretapping
scandal where it was a law enforcement
access point, that once
you get access to the access point,
you can use its properties and its
permissions to get a much wider access.
Similarly, China attacked Google's
law enforcement access point, using that
to get information about dissidents.
And so if you create an
escrow agent, if you create a method for
law enforcement to get access to it, you
create a very tempting target that will
be certainly in the sights of any
attackers.
So a lot of these arguments have been
raised. And what we heard back from
from some people in the policymaker
things is, OK, we see that
you have a problem with back doors.
Maybe we should just rename it so
we don't want a back door.
We want a front door.
Or, you know, sometimes people have
talked about side door, trap door.
And this is very sort of
typical of politicians
is that, you know, I think the problem is
the rhetoric, the name
that we can you know, The Washington Post
also saying, well, we understand that a
backdoor can be exploited by
bad guys.
So instead, how about a secure
golden key?
And, you know, this this was widely,
widely criticized and ridiculed,
as it should have been.
But it reflects an attitude
of we'll just
say what we want, which is something
magical, a secure golden key,
and then tossed the problem back
to Technologist's to.
Trying to solve and maybe even legislate,
so they have to solve it
and sort of reflecting an attitude
that this is all they use, the term
wizardry, it is magical wizardry
that people can do and come up with
magical solutions.
So while this is going on, it was still
they're having some troubles that, you
know, these proposals will were ridiculed
over a lot of people who are pointing out
the many flaws with back doors.
But they held
out an interesting hope.
And this is a quote from the general
counsel of the office of the director of
National Intelligence, the
oversight agency that
looks over the U.S.
intelligence community.
Well, what if there was a terrorist
attack or criminal event that could be
shown to have where encryption had
hindered law enforcement?
That's the real thing that we need to to
turn this discussion around.
So we had
a number of attacks in
this last term, tragic attacks.
And but what what do you do if
you have these things? But Krypto wasn't
involved.
Well, you suggest that it was anyway.
So we have the the prescient comment here
from Michael Morell, the former
CIA deputy director.
We don't know anything, but I bet you the
encryption was involved.
And then he proceeded to talk about how
how encryption was very, very dangerous.
So I following the attacks in
Paris, attacks in San Bernardino,
there were a lot of talking heads who
are going on the television shows,
the public policy debates
and trying to say that encryption
was at fault when in fact,
the Paris attackers use plain text
text messages.
The San Bernardino attackers actually
mostly they communicated just directly in
person, but
they also use some direct messages
that were not encrypted.
And they're also trying to take this time
to demonize encryption, to
try and get people with fear,
uncertainty and doubt, the home
secretary may brings up what?
What? Back in the 90s, we had called
the, you know, four horsemen of the info
apocalypse, talking about
child pornographers, crime,
drugs, terrorists.
The Senator Feinstein, who is on the
U.S. Intelligence Committee, went even
a little further, basically saying
that encryption will be used to
behead children,
which, you know, I think this is
taking it a little far, a little fun.
So with this in
this atmosphere, we're starting to see
some proposals come out of many countries
to try to limit encryption, sometimes
to they're talking about mandating a back
door, sometimes mandating access
to plain text without sort of specifying
the the manner of the access
or putting laws that would help
in danger. Encryption.
Probably the most prominent of these
right now is what's known as the
snoopers charter, the Investigatory
Powers Act out of the United Kingdom.
Now, this is an interesting proposal
because it is not just aimed at
telecommunication companies in the United
Kingdom. It reports to regulate
companies all over the world.
Now, this raises some questions.
You know, if you were had a company who
did no business in the United Kingdom,
you were completely separate from it.
You know, how would they be able to
enforce that?
But for a large company that has offices
all over the world, many of them will
have offices or people on the ground
within the U.K.
that would be subject to the UK's
jurisdiction.
And this can be a
tool that the U.K.
can use to try and enforce this against
them.
And it's a long bill as 299
pages.
A lot of detail is actually a lot of
problems with the bill beyond the
encryption issue. But today we want to
focus on that.
And in Section 189,
they have a provision dealing with
electronic protection.
This is a term which we believe they
mean encryption.
And it is saying that
if the provider put
on the electronic protection, it
may be obligated to take it off.
Now, this could
be interpreted a variety of ways.
It will be interesting to see how it
eventually gets interpreted,
but it could be interpreted to require
weakening encryption, holding a key
banning end to end encryption if it is
not possible to do this.
And one of the things that's interesting
about it, so it has some language there
saying that
only if it's practicable,
only if it's, you know, feasible,
reasonable to do this.
But this is done in the home secretary
determination. So it won't be the
technologies that would be able to
determine whether it was practical to
be able to remove the encryption, but
rather the home secretary say, I think
that's practical. And so now you're
obligated to do that.
So the latest version of the
Investigatory Powers Act came out in
November.
It is currently before a committee in
the U.K. parliament, which is accepting
comments right now.
A number of organizations, EFF and many
other civil society organizations, have
submitted comment.
A lot of industry have submitted
comments.
Apple in particular made some news with
its comments with a strong
defense of privacy
and warning against back
doors, saying that a key left under the
doormat would not just be there for
the good guys, but recognizing
the bad guys would find it, too.
There been a couple of other interesting
ones around the world.
Australia has a Defense Trade
Controls Act that has some
interesting language talking about the
intangible supply.
So, you know, this is a,
you know, munitions control act and
export control.
And, you know, it's pretty obvious when
you are supplying a tank, whether, you
know, supply or not, it's not very
hard to figure out.
But when you're talking about encryption,
it gets a little bit weird because
you know what? If you explain the
algorithm to somebody, what if you showed
them a copy of the algorithm?
Is that exporting?
Is that supplying the technology?
The Department of Defense in Australia
has suggested that merely explaining
an algorithm could be intangible
supply come within the zone
of this act.
Now, it remains to be seen whether that
interpretation will be will be upheld in
the courts.
But what this means is that there is a
a threat, a possibility
that somebody who is doing ordinary
teaching and research activities could
be subject to these controls with very
severe penalties.
And that provides a chilling effect for
people trying to do things which are very
important for our security by doing
the research, doing the teaching.
So a lot of people have
signed a petition against hundreds of
experts have explained why this
is a very, very bad idea.
India also came out this September
with a draft national encryption
policy.
This was a sort of particularly
bad one.
It said that everyone was required to
store a plain text copy of
their encrypted messages, keep that
around and then be able to hand
it over upon request.
This was widely condemned and ridiculed
and eventually India
withdrew this.
They're going to go back to the drawing
boards, but we'll have to keep an eye out
to see what they come up with next.
Very recently, actually, on Sunday
of, I guess four days
ago, China passed a new
anti-terrorism law.
In a draft version, there was a provision
that would require technology
companies to hand over their encryption
codes.
The final version did remove that,
but it still contains some very dangerous
language, saying that the companies
are required to provide technical
interfaces, decryption and
other technical support.
So, again, this could be interpreted
to mean that they have to find a way
to be able to decrypt it, which means
having some weakness, some backdoor,
some additional key that would enable
them to do so.
And one of the things that actually also
came up from China's anti-terrorism
law is that
when discussing it, they were pointing
to other countries who
have put in or proposed similar
things so that
in when when the governments
around the world put forward proposals to
create back doors to to
suggest that encryption is a problem and
they mean it, say, well, we're trying to
make it so that it's safe for,
you know, Western democracy.
At the same time, regimes which
are much more
totalitarian can use the same
language, use the same rhetoric to
justify their own attacks and
their own attempts to make it so people
can't have secure and private
communications
in the United States.
There is not yet
legislation to mandate
back doors and mandate access to
encryption.
President Obama has said that he
will not, for now, call
for this legislation.
This is for now is somewhat worrisome.
And we organized
with with several other civil society
groups a petition asking
him to support strong
encryption after he had put
out this final statement to make a more
clear statement that they would put that
aside and say that, no, they weren't
going to ask for back doors, not just for
now, but but forever.
And we have not yet
gotten the full response to that.
So hopefully that will come soon and
it will be a clearer statement.
But right now, we're sort of in a waiting
game to see whether it will go forward.
And the rumor has it that the Senate
Intelligence Committee is going to be
proposing a bill in the coming
spring. Now, if they do propose that, of
course, we will fight against that bill,
try and make sure that it doesn't get
passed and if it gets passed,
move to get it thrown
out in the courts as as unconstitutional.
I want to take a brief moment to talk
about the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
this is a international trade
agreement that has been negotiated,
is now being considered.
And some people look through this
lengthy agreement once it became public
and noted that there was a little bit on
encryption and there was a question,
well, was there actually some good news
in this? Otherwise, the TPP is fairly
terrible.
And it turns out in the final analysis,
no, there was a provision in there or is
a provision in there saying that a
provider may not be compelled to give a
key, but only as a condition
of sale. So it's silent as to whether
they could be compelled to give a key
under other conditions.
And there's also a provision in there
that said that the provider can be
required to give decrypted content,
which still has a lot of the same
problems that
we have been we have been fighting
against.
So at the same time as this legislation
is going on, the public policy debates
in the background, they're also
technical attempts to try and
reduce the effectiveness of encryption,
make it harder to use harder use
securely.
One of the more prominent ones that came
out of the Snowden documents there was
routing around encryption.
We have here the illustration
where they looked at the communications
between data centers where
Google added and removed SSL
at a particular point and they were able
to get in there and get the unencrypted
communications.
Now, when that came out, this
caused Google and
many other companies to beef up their
encryption and encrypt between the data
centers. But this is still
people are still looking for it.
And you can rest assured that the
intelligence agencies are trying to find
places where they can just go find a
gap in encryption and get the information
there. They're also working on breaking
encryption and certain vulnerabilities
and putting on malware.
Go through a couple of these.
One, as we know from the Snowden
documents about the Bull Run program.
Two hundred and fifty million dollar a
year budget to insert vulnerabilities,
to influence policies, to participate
in cryptography
discussions, to try to weaken and
influence the standards that are being
used.
And we saw a an example
of that with the Orissa's
use of the dual Essy
D.R big
encryption standard or the random number
generator.
This had a flaw
that if there was a I'm
only going to go over the technology of
this very briefly. We don't have much
time. But there was a constant queue
that if you if you knew what it was, if
you made it special,
would operate to significantly
reduce the complexity of an attack and
basically be able to backdoor the random
number generator and therefore be able
to more easily get
access to encryption.
And the NSA paid RSA ten million
dollars to make it the default.
And we had.
So this was known to have a potential
back doors early as 2007
after some of the Snowden documents came
out. After we got some reports
about the 10 million dollar payment,
people looked at it very deeply
and showed how it could be used and prove
that it could be used for this backdoor.
But very recently, we actually got a
an interesting example of this backdoor
in operation, but it's a very curious
case.
So Juniper uses an operating
system for some of its routing software
that used this dual AC
program, but it didn't use the
CPU that had been suggested by
the NSA.
They use a new and alternative cue.
So perhaps this means that, you know,
there was a back door, but but they
changed the locks.
And in addition, the output from dual
HESI was passed through a second stronger
random number generator, which,
you know, you may
have made it so that
it was it was not a big deal, that
it would be put through the stronger one
and made it made as strong as that.
However, people discover by looking at
the at the code that there was
a portion that was looking at the raw
output, which is the purpose of which
would give them these 32 byte to be
necessary in order to
passively break
VPN.
And in addition, there was a second floor
that came out was that somebody had hard
coded a password for
S.H. and Telnet into the program.
These look to be perhaps different
attacks there. There one is good for
passive collection of VPN.
The other is good for going in and
owning a particular router.
But what is very curious about this
is what exactly happened
here. It seems like someone
came in, took advantage of
the back door that the NSA had
created through the Dualeh Sea
and used it for their own devices.
This is illustrating what are the great
dangers of putting in a backdoor.
They depend on the notion that only
you will be able to use this back door,
that you'll have the key to keep others
out and have access for yourself.
And yet what we see here is an example
where someone was able to switch out the
locks, create a new key and
create their own back door that would
be dependent on this infrastructure
that had been maintained.
Finally, malware malware continues
to be a way
to root around encryption,
if you control the endpoint, you can
go ahead and look at the plain
text.
You use a key logger to get people's
passwords. You can basically
avoid the encryption so they can think
that they're having and end encryption.
But of course, only it's only good
if the end isn't compromised.
And this is this is a tool that is more
oriented towards targeted attacks,
while the other tools, like passively
looking at VPN, more oriented
towards mass attacks.
All right, so how do we fight back?
What are what are the arguments we can
raise? What can we say, the policymakers?
What can we do to fight against this?
Well, we can rely on arguments with
principle, with public policy,
with pragmatism and with promotion,
with principle.
We have to explain to people that strong
encryption is required to
effectuate human rights principles, that
we need it for privacy, that we need it
for free expression that encryption
is going to help us bring a brighter
future and look to the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which enshrines within it the
notion that people should have the
privacy free from arbitrary
interference.
The principle from Article 19
free expression that people have the
right to free expression that right
includes the ability to seek,
receive and impart information and
ideas through any media.
And in order to effectuate that right
to receive and impart information
and ideas, we need to have encryption.
We need, like any media should include
encryption. And you should be able
to include within those ideas
encryption.
And this is also the notion that code is
speech. Code is an aspect of freedom of
expression, that if we are going to have
these rights as important human right
principle, then it must allow for
the publication of strong
and Christian crypto systems.
And I think this especially comes
true for open source systems
where people are putting out and
publishing things for the world to see
because they want the world to look at
their crypto systems, see what the
problems might be, find vulnerabilities,
report them back.
Those things can be improved and be part
of the ongoing dialog.
And this requires having
the freedom of publication, the freedom
of discussion, and having people come
together at places like C.C.C.
to discuss, debate and improve
on the crypto systems.
And I think the other important human
right principle that needs to be
recognized is that protecting against
oppressive regimes is more important
than maximizing spying,
that we have a greater role in trying
to protect people, give them the
freedom to organize, to talk among
themselves, to have a private space
to effectuate their
democracy rather than
increasing and maximizing the power
of the state.
So weakening encryption
is actually it's mostly good for
mass on targeted spying,
things like where it is,
if they have target is fine.
They can use tools like malware, targeted
attacks, tailored
access and go
after a particular target.
But when you're going after an entire
crypto system, what is the purpose
of that? And the purpose is
to enable mass decryption of
mass communications so you control
through it and look for subversive
elements, look for keywords,
and mass spying is less effective
and more invasive.
So one of the reasons we have to hold the
line and having strong encryption is
at least to require a security
state to have to have a reason to go
after people have to put into some effort
and make it sure that they're only
targeting where they have the strongest
its most necessary to the
to the reasons they're looking for.
We also want to have strong encryption
so that we can have a feeling of
the strength coming from looking at the
math, looking at
how the crypto system works, having that
tested by our best cryptanalysis
so that we can say it's not just a black
box, that we put something in their trust
that it works OK, and then
hope for the best.
And the thing is, you can't combine that
with with back doors, because
if you're if you're putting in a backdoor
system, you don't know
all the ways in which it works out.
If you have something like the Clipper
chip, it was it was a black
box for the first three
or four years that it was available.
They weren't showing the algorithm.
It was just trust us, we've done this.
Well said.
We want strong encryption, which can be
looked at, tested and understood so
we can trust the math.
Also, we want strong encryption because
it enables innovation.
Since we we had the first crypto
wars, the availability
of strong encryption has been
tremendously useful.
The e-commerce that we use day
to day it was enabled by the ability
to have encrypted communications,
authenticated communications between
servers and browsers.
Strong encryption and the availability of
it have come with innovations like
Bitcoin. The possibility of
a cryptocurrency
depends on the availability of strong
encryption. And after having that be
a theoretical possibility
for many years, we have found in Bitcoin
a real world example of some innovation
relying upon strong encryption.
And if we go ahead and try to force the
companies to compromise on security,
this makes everybody less
safe, that
encryption is critical for
security. So oftentimes the policymakers,
when they're trying to argue encryption
against encryption, they're making an
appeal to national security.
We need to have weak encryption for
security.
This is a false debate.
This is there's not a trade off between
security and encryption.
Security is vital.
Encryption is vital for security.
At the same time, if you say,
all right, you know, we we
we still we want to have
this backdoor.
If you put aside the arguments about it,
even if you think that a backdoor
is a good idea, it's still
you have to address the other question.
Who do you give the back door to?
So even if you think your own government
is the best, most honorable government
in the world, and they will surely
only use this for for
happiness and good
at the same time. Well, what about the
other governments? And when you say that
we get to have a back door
for for these communications,
then the other governments, the ones that
you might not like, the ones you might
find to be a repressive regime,
they're going to ask for a backdoor, too.
And then who gets to have a how do we
have a principled discussion about
that? And we saw this, as we just saying,
in the Chinese anti-terrorism law,
where they're using citing to
some of the language and rhetoric
to say, well, we're just doing what other
countries are doing.
I think our public policy thing, you're
going dark is a big thing that that
you'll you'll hear from from governments
say, well, encryption is making us going
dark. And this this is just not
recognizing that we're actually in
a golden age of surveillance,
that right now you have cameras
on so many street corners,
people are carrying around a location
tracker, a mobile phone in their
pockets at all times.
Everything they do, making credit
card purchases, having
even encrypted communications or
providing tons of metadata that is being
trolled and analyzed, it
is is easy for governments
to conduct surveillance that has ever
been. And yet they want to
say that they're going dark.
Just add this extra element so they
can try and get the encrypted
communications.
Could also argue about pragmatism.
Well, I mean, one argument, it won't
work.
And this is true as far as it goes,
that when you if you if you try to ban
encryption, you're trying to say that you
can't have strong encryption.
What are you going to do about an open
source project? If you mandate that it
has a back door, someone might compile
it without that backdoor
and free software is hard
to stop. And even if you make it hard to
publish in certain jurisdictions,
information wants to be free.
It will find a way out there.
This is good as far as it goes.
Those we're saying before,
the governments
are mostly concerned with widespread
availability of encryption so
that it's only so good to have
encryption available with people, with
the technical sophistication enough
to compile their own code.
We could also argue on a pragmatic level
about math that it is simply not possible
to make encryption simultaneously
weak and strong.
And finally, if the argument is about
national security, about terrorists, all
these efforts to weaken encryption
will mostly affect law abiding people.
It's not going to stop terrorists from
being able to use these tools.
So what can you do about it?
Well, you can help by promoting,
creating, improving and using encryption,
show your friends how to use encryption.
Thank you.
Go to.
Make it as widespread as possible.
You know how to use it, I think probably
most people in this room have used
encryption many, many times.
But you might have some friends who are
new to this, show them how to use it to
show them how to operate a secure
messenger, show them how to
install TOR
has a program surveillance self-defense,
SD EFG.
It has tools to show people how to defend
themselves.
And for those of you who are programmers
who are working on some of these
projects, trying to make censorship
resistant crypto tools, make
them open source, make the
distribution as wide as possible
so that it will be difficult to take back
and put that genie back in the bottle,
use reproducible build so that someone
who download it will know they
are getting and compiling the
thing that you have shown them with the
open source to have strong encryption.
Just talk briefly about some of the
efforts that effort is working on to
try and help with the widespread adoption
of encryption.
You heard earlier in C.C.C..
I hope some of you went to it.
There was a talk about let's encrypt.
This is a new certificate authority
to try to make it easy and fun
to add SSL to every
website, to add a transport layer of
security so that there's no more excuse
for having an unencrypted
website.
We also have been looking at
rating big providers
on how well they are working
at encrypting the Web, so we have the
encrypt the Web report, there's a
screenshot of it there.
You can see a number of companies have
gotten five out of five.
This is in part a reaction to that
smiley face we saw on the slide earlier
where they were putting in stronger
encryption in reaction to the student
document. And we're continuing to put
pressure on all the large providers
to massively increase their use of strong
encryption.
We also have the secure messaging
scorecard, which goes
through I think it's about 30 or 40
different messaging tools and
provides some information about what kind
of encryption they use with
a checkbox system.
So if you want to find out what messaging
systems are using encryption, how much
they're using, go check it out of the
secure messaging scorecard and
try to add and start using
as many encryption programs as possible
so that you can take advantage
of strong encryption, keep it strong,
keep it safe, and make sure that we win
crypto wars. Part two.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you for a great talk.
We now have about 10 minutes for Q&A,
so please just line up at the
microphones.
Of course, if you're on the Internet,
use ISEA or Twitter to
also ask questions.
And we will just. And if you're leaving,
please be quiet.
Stay out of the line of sight of the
cameras.
Just try to be.
Just don't leave maybe, but be quiet if
you do.
I now microphone number one, please.
I I happened to
stumble upon the scorecard
once and
and WhatsApp was marked
with a lot of green checkboxes,
how much can we trust WhatsApp,
especially in the terms of it
being a really high
value target since
so many people are using it?
So what's out there is indeed a high
value target? I think they have,
because they're saying over a billion
users for a long time they
were not having strong encryption.
They started to work with
open whisper systems and Moxy
Marlinspike to increase
the encryption right around the time that
they were being absorbed into
Facebook.
So I think they're they are making
efforts to increase the encryption.
Have it have it be good,
though? I would say the secure messaging
scorecard.
I think this is true actually of a number
of our rating things. It it does rely
upon public information
that's available. And we don't have the
ability to to sort of go in there
and see if something secret has happened
to look through the to unless there's
open source code, we can't look through
the code.
So it's based upon the information
that is available.
So I am hopeful that that they are
looking at that, but
only they can can guarantee.
So sorry.
So you did not talk
to the internal auditors that
happened to have a look at the source
code?
That's correct. OK, thank you.
And now a question from the Internet,
please, thank you.
Are we facing a future where encryption
is totally prohibited by law?
And why is it not
today? So is it because the agency
are still able to obtain the data?
So are we facing a
future in which encryption will be here,
but no, not yet
and I hope not ever.
We won the first crypto wars
and I think we can win this one.
We can show them both through, through
reasoned, through, through principle,
through rhetoric.
Why banning encryption?
Having a world without a strong
encryption is a terrible idea.
And we will fight to maintain
that as long as we can.
And even if some jurisdictions
do pass laws that ban
encryption, encryption will still be out
there, be available from other sites.
So I think that we can win this war.
Microphone number two, please.
Oh, hi, my name is Mary,
and this should not be intended to be
the troll question, but what the other
one is opinion about the homebrewed
krypto.
So my opinion about Homebrew Krypto.
Well, one thing I think
Bruce Schneier has said is
that anybody can create a crypto system
that they themselves cannot break
and.
So, I mean, this is not to say that
someone can't come up with a
good idea, but before
you can put much trust
into these things, it has to be peer
reviewed. It has to be made available,
get world class cryptographers
to attack it, find the flaws,
improve it based upon those flaws,
and see if you can do better.
So, you know, if somebody has
a better a better crypto system,
the only way we're going to know is
if it is heavily tested, heavily
vetted and not put out there
until everybody can look at it,
attack it and fail to break it.
But what if the crypto is using just only
those private circle of people?
If the crypto is only sorry
for some some for for a small group
of people, I would
still rely upon publicly
vetted crypto programs.
And if you're if you're creating an
application that uses crypto,
you should not only use a
crypto program that has been tested,
explained why you're choosing that one,
have some some thought
into it so people can understand that
decision making process and make sure
they're making their decision about
whether to use it based upon it.
OK, great, thanks.
Number five, please.
Yeah, hi, my name is Mathias, I'm on the
board of Reporters Without Borders,
Germany, and in case you don't
know, here we are suing the BND because
we think that what they're doing in
collecting data and analyzing
them is out of proportion,
breaking the law and probably even the
Constitution.
So thank you for that.
Yeah.
Now, I gave that little intro because
I have a question, it might not be so
popular here in this room,
if you assume that your conclusions
and your propositions are correct and I
think they are, then we
have to assume that we need strong
crypto. If we at the same time assume
end to end encryption, if we at the same
time assume that law
enforcement and police have to have some
way to go after the bad guys,
what's the consequence?
Does that mean that you are
in favor of giving law enforcement
the ability, for example, to use
Trojan horses or other kinds of
technologies to put them on people's
computers? Because we can assume
that the bad guys are not just doing
phone calls over regular
phone lines nowadays, or if you don't
think that this is proportionate
or the way to go, then what is.
Well, thank you for that question.
But what we've done at EFF
with ourselves, actually a number of
other organizations that we can come up
with the necessary and proportionate
principles you go to necessary and
proportionate dawg to see them.
There are 13 principles for
government surveillance in order to
balance the needs of the state
against human rights principles.
So when they can go forward, I mean,
there are 13 principles.
It's a bit much to go through right now.
But they the gist of it is that
we want to make sure that it's only when
it is necessary.
And the amount
that the government will be allowed to do
is proportionate to the crime that
they're investigating the the act that
they're they're investigating so
that whether they may use a particular
tool would be dependent upon the
circumstances and always with
court oversight, making sure
that it is done in accordance with law,
in accordance with these principles.
So I encourage you to check out necessary
and proportionate, dawg.
Thanks.
And and now the Internet's place.
Are there any documents, ATF,
about CUFI and Jakob talked about
a while ago about Q
Fire validation software?
I'm not aware of any.
Well, that was quick number four, please.
I really like the overview of arguments
you you gave. I discuss these matters
often with a wide range of people in the
past few months.
And one of the arguments that you have
not actively or directly refute is
that, well, we have wiretapping
laws for phone conversations.
And could they
not just analogously holds
for digital communications in a more
broad sense, what we would be your
response to such an argument?
But I think there's actually less and
less of a difference between phone
conversations and electronic
communications. In fact, these days, many
phone conversations are actually going
over voice over IP there.
They are being transmitted the same way
as as an electronic
communication.
And so, I mean, and
many countries actually have brought
these things together and applied some
of the wiretapping rules to
voice over IP, even though it
goes over a different, different network.
You know, the important thing, the
principles behind this is to make sure
that they are getting access
to the content of communications
only in accordance to law with a high
standard having, you know, come back with
a warrant, make sure that before
you get access to to voice communications
or written communications, you
are meeting the highest possible test to
make sure that this is something that is
necessary and proportionate to the
investigation.
So the reason I
bring this up is because often it's not
allowed to construct
a telecommunications network in such a
way that it's not possible to wiretap
the plane conversation going on.
And this is in some sense analogous to
what you're discussing here.
It is. I mean, I think, you know, in the
United States, we have the computer
assistance, the Law Enforcement Act,
KHALIA, it was actually passed in
the 90s.
It exempted the Internet, but for
voice communications required
to have some some access
to these to these communications.
And so I don't think we should
move that beyond that.
I thought we actually and I think there
was a terrible idea in the beginning,
and this still does not
prevent you from using.
And encryption is just the people don't
really have
easy technologies if you're using a plain
old telephone system to have an encrypted
communication.
But if you use a
voice over IP application, for example,
if you use signal, you can have
an encrypted voice communication
so that even if they have a
wiretap compliant network,
they're still just going to get the
encrypted information that was
going through. So end and encryption
is the is the better solution for
the end user.
And we're out of time.
Please think of it again.
Thank you very much.