Experts Blast Encryption 'Backdoor' Plan

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.databreachtoday.com/experts-blast-encryption-backdoor-plan-a-8381


A dozen well-known cryptographers and cybersecurity specialists have
published a paper explaining why they believe it's unrealistic to create a
so-called "backdoor" to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to
decrypt coded information.

"You can't have a world where the good guys can spy and the bad guys
can't," says cryptographer Bruce Schneier, one of the authors of the paper,
Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to
All Data and Communications. "All we can get is where everyone can spy or
nobody can spy."

The paper was published July 7, the day before FBI Director James Comey and
Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates were scheduled to testify
before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the dangers they believe new
encryption technologies pose in preventing law enforcement from monitoring
criminals, terrorists and adversaries.

The paper contends providing law enforcement with "exceptional access" to
encrypted data would pose grave security risks, imperil innovation and
raise thorny issues for human rights and international relations.

"Building backdoors into all computer and communication systems is against
most of the principles of security engineering, and it also against the
principles of human rights," one of the paper's authors, University of
Cambridge Professor Ross Anderson, writes in his blog.

Three Obstacles

The paper's authors identify three problems with providing law enforcement
and intelligence agencies with exceptional access to decrypt data:

Providing exceptional access would force a U-turn from the best practices
being deployed to make the Internet more secure. These practices include
forward secrecy, in which decryption keys are deleted immediately after
use, so that stealing them would not compromise other communications. A
related technique, authenticated encryption, uses the same temporary key to
guarantee confidentiality and to verify that the message has not been
forged or tampered with.
Building in exceptional access would substantially increase system
complexity. Security researchers see complexity as the enemy of security;
each new feature can interact with others to create vulnerabilities. To
achieve widespread exceptional access, new technology features would have
to be deployed and tested with hundreds of thousands of developers all
around the world, creating an extremely complex computing environment.
Exceptional access would create concentrated targets that could attract bad
actors. Security credentials that unlock the data would have to be retained
by the platform provider, law enforcement agencies or a trusted third
party. If law enforcement's keys guaranteed access to everything, an
attacker who gained access to these keys would enjoy the same privilege.
Law enforcement's stated need for rapid access to data would make it
impractical to store keys offline or split keys among multiple keyholders,
as security engineers would normally do with extremely high-value
credentials. As the recent Office of Personnel Management breach
demonstrates, much harm can arise when many organizations rely on a single
institution that itself has security vulnerabilities.

Clipper Chip Debate Revisited

This isn't the first time security experts have voiced joint opposition to
government efforts to bypass encryption. In 1997, the cryptographic
community lobbied against the proposed Clipper Chip, which sought to have
all strong encryption systems retain a copy of keys necessary to decrypt
information with a trusted third party that would turn over keys necessary
to decrypt data to law enforcement with a court order. The government
eventually abandoned its Clipper Chip initiative.

"It's still a bad idea," another of the report's authors, Columbia
University Computer Science Professor Steven Bellovin, writes in his blog.
"The underlying problem of complexity hasn't gone away; in fact, it's worse
today. We're doing a lot more with cryptography, so the bypasses have to be
more complex and hence riskier. There are also more serious problems of
jurisdiction; technology and hence crypto are used in far more countries
today than 20 years ago."

In a joint press conference last January, President Obama and British Prime
Minister David Cameron said they saw a need for law enforcement to be able
to gain access to encrypted data on a suspected terrorist's digital device,
though Obama stopped short of calling for a law to require manufacturers to
provide a so-called "backdoor" to break encryption on mobile devices (see
Obama Sees Need for Encryption Backdoor).

Comey, in an Oct. 16 speech, said he wanted Congress to update a
20-year-old law to give law enforcement authorities access to the encrypted
data of suspected criminals, a point he's expected to reiterate at two
hearings on July 8, before the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence
committees. His comments came after smartphone makers announced that they
were designing their products to give device owners complete control over
encryption keys.

"We are struggling to keep up with changing technology, and to maintain our
ability to actually collect the communications we are authorized to
intercept," Comey said last fall (see FBI Director Ignites Encryption
Debate). "And if the challenges of real-time interception threaten to leave
us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark
place."

Questions Posed

The paper's authors posed a series of questions officials should answer
before the government tries to implement a backdoor program. One key
question, they say, is: What oversight program would be required to monitor
the effectiveness, cost, benefits and abuse of exceptional access? The
authors also suggest officials gauge the economic impact of providing
exceptional access. "What economic effect would be considered too impactful
for exceptional access to be considered worthwhile?" they ask.

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