(Guardian) David Cameron has made some headline-grabbing election promises, but none so technically implausible as his vow to eliminate communications tools that “we cannot read” earlier this year. He’s not alone in proposing a ban on effective cryptographic tools. The FBI wants the same thing, and their zeal to protect the state from citizens’ secrecy has even prompted it to alter its exemplary security advice. The suggestion that Americans should encrypt their devices so as to protect their data when they inevitably lose them, have them stolen or throw them away without securely erasing them has been expunged from the FBI’s site.
It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.
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