Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

←2018→ Months Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own. Subscribe to this blog RSS feed

Home :: Security 21 May 2018 Schneier and Kerr on Encryption Workarounds Security Bruce Schneier is a famous cryptography expert and Orin Kerr a famous cyberlaw professor. Together they've published a law journal article on Encryption Workarounds. It's intended for lawyers so it's quite accessible to non-technical readers. The article starts with a summary of how encryption works, and then goes through six workarounds to get the text of an encrypted message: Find the key: for example, you might find a piece of paper on which the user has written the key. Guess the key: for example, the user's birth date or ``password.'' Compel the key: make the user reveal the key, or force the user to use a biometric like a thumbprint. Exploit a flaw: crypto software has bugs, and some has deliberate back doors. Access the plaintext when the device in use: Silk Road drug market operator Ross Ulbricht used full disk encryption, so agents at a café staged a distraction, grabbed his open laptop, and searched it on the spot while arresting him. Locate a plaintext copy: cloud backups are a good place to start. It then draws some lessons, starting with the obvious one that no workaround works all the time but they all work some of the time, and then considers the often ambiguous legal status of workarounds. It's well worth reading for anyone interested in the contentious intersection of law and cryptography.   posted at: 15:27 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Security/encwork.html

Topics Copyright Law - 30 Email - 228 ICANN - 128 Internet - 73 Money - 31 Security - 3 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE Online Clairvoyance Platforms Sanctioned for GDPR Violations 53 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Italian Apple Cake 858 days ago Related sites Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Network Abuse Clearinghouse My Mastodon feed

© 2005-2024 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.