Humor me... if encryption had a backdoor, then ransomware could be effectively mitigated.... Though I'm not a proponent of backdoors by any means, I don't see the logical flaw here.
...Because criminals are going to use state-sanctioned encryption software with mandated backdoors?
Even if everything off the shelf and open source has some built-in escrow unlocking keys compiled in, hackers are just going to find those code paths and remove them. Encryption works because of certain mathematical principals and laws.
Backdoors will only let governments look at legitimately encrypted data and not anything made by criminals who know how technology works.
There's a bigger question here: what if the NSA or CIA or some other intelligence/defence organisation discovers a solution to solve some of these hard problems in polynomial time .. and then doesn't release that information so they can use it to spy.
In that situation you're going even further: you have agents who are literally holding back scientific research that could change the entire field of mathematics and human understanding, research that could advance number theory by orders of magnitude (a jump equal to that of going from the first flight Kitty Hawk to the Saturn 5 rocket), for limited political gain.
So "If encryption had a backdoor" is meaningless. It's really "If a given encryption implementation had a back door" and no one is making the criminals use certain algorithms.
Anyone who actually knows what they are doing, and are prepared to break the law, would just use AES. All of those law-abiding institutions would be forced to use a weak encryption scheme.
Sure, it might help stop script kiddies, but it won't help to stop professionals, and professionals are the ones that you have to worry about, since they end up hosing 45,000+ installations in a day.
Assuming that the criminal opts to use the encryption with an NSA backdoor and the victim is able to schedule time at their local NSA Genius Bar to recover their data.
This is the flaw in the logic. "Encryption" can't have a backdoor any more than math can have a back door.
Specific types of encryption can. But there's nothing to stop a malicious user from using a non-backdoored encryption algorithm or inventing their own.
How would you practically do that? Send all those encrypted hard drives to NSA to be decrypted? Publish the backdoor, effectively rendering that encryption scheme broken?
