
Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted 3rd Party Encryption (1997) - mimixco
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8GM8F2W
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jcims
Quite the set of authors:

Hal Abelson

Ross Anderson

Steven M. Bellovin

Josh Benaloh

Matt Blaze

Whitfield Diffie

John Gilmore

Peter G. Neumann

Ronald L. Rivest

Jeffrey I. Schiller

Bruce Schneier

Timely for us as we try to sort our way through governance of cloud service
provider managed keys. On one hand there is a clear compliance and regulatory
path to use something like AWS KMS, buuuut...

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cybervegan
It's not about the application of _morally correct_ decryption of messages by
a third-party, but about the _immoral_ decryption (whatever that is); an
algorithm or system cannot tell the difference in the intent of the decryptor.

If there exists a technical method by which to decrypt arbitrary messages, it
will be abused. Claiming you can keep this method secret whilst the world
searches in earnest for that secret is unrealistic. Saying that only certain
types of communication should be subject to vulnerable encryption infers that
the encryption algorithm can tell the difference between those types of
communication: is it OK to encrypt banking transactional communications with
unbreakable encryption, but internet chat communications must be encrypted
with breakable encryption? How can you tell the difference? How can you ensure
that someone isn't sending communications that are evidence of criminal
activities over the banking communications channels? The Algorithm doesn't
know or care what kind of communication it is, and once encrypted, an outside
observer can't tell anyway.

You could say "well, chat program providers are only allowed to use breakable
encryption, but bankers are allowed to use the unbreakable kind". So, now you
have created a protected class of people, who are allowed privacy, and another
who are not. Bankers commit crimes too, but the evidence of their crimes won't
be available to be decrypted. So maybe you could make it illegal for people to
communicate plans of criminal activity over unbreakable encryption, but that
won't stop criminals from doing it. You could ban encryption entirely, but
then whole, legitimate industries, such as online banking; international
banking; stock exchanges; online commerce; "cloud computing"; and managed
service providers would be untenable, and wither and die.

