A Recent History of Back Doored Encryption, in 4 links

This is partially a footnotes section from last week’s Crypto Saves Lives post, but every week brings new stories, and this week was a doozy. So, let’s recap the whole “backdoored crypto / secret golden keys can work” argument:

Claims:

(1) We can protect private information

Cough OPM Cough

Update: “Security bloggers and researchers claim to have uncovered a publicly available database exposing the personal information of 191 million voters on the Internet. The information contains voters’ names, home addresses, voter IDs, phone numbers and date of birth, as well as political affiliations and a detailed voting history since 2000.”

(2) Well, we are really good at protecting super-important crypto keys that only give good guys access,

So, those luggage locks with a “golden key”, now required world-wide that only trained TSA agents can pop open? Yeah, about that… - TSA’s master key set was allowed to be photographed, and while that photo was quickly taken off the internet, the damage was done. Anyone can now 3D print completely functional TSA keys.

(3) Besides, adding a backdoor won’t cause problems!

Ask Juniper Networks about that.</em> Not only did their secure networking system get rendered significantly less secure, this allowed hackers (from the US? From somewhere else??) to break in, alter code, and make their secure tunneling solutions absolutely useless.

(4) But what if were just more innovative?

Hey! Here’s a bonus “Clipper Chip” history lesson: https://arstechnica.com/…/what-the-government-shouldve…/ TL;DR - we’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work then either.