[natch]

The author forgets that governments aren't very good at protecting their own secrets.

For example, if even the NSA can't protect its own secret hacking tools from leaking, why should anyone expect they, or any such entity for that matter, can be trusted to always protect all their secret keys? Answer: They can't. Any other answer is a fantasy.

Unless I am missing something here, it seems this problem utterly destroys the author's argument.

[ryanlol]

I'm not sure if this is actually the case. HSMs exist and it should be well within the governments capabilities to implement sufficient physical controls to defend against attacks.

I mean, they seem to manage pretty well with nuclear weapons.

[natch]

>I mean, they seem to manage pretty well with nuclear weapons.

"Seem to" but no. They don't. With countries like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and China all having got ahold of the know-how to make nukes, all evidence is that government has failed spectacularly on this front.

[gizmo686]

Is there any evidence that those countries got access to US nuclear secrets?

Science and engineering technology has advanced considerably since it took a Manhattan project for the US to build them. Plus, even from the beggining, the US was not the only country reasearching the tech; so if those countries did use another countries classified nuclear info, said info might still have originated outside of the US

[natch]

>Is there any evidence that those countries got access to US nuclear secrets?

There is no evidence that they didn't. And why qualify your question with United States? The leakage of secrets we need to be concerned about is not just from the US. If they got secrets from non-US countries, that is a concern too.

Turning back to encryption backdoor keys, other countries, besides the US, will also have these keys, if such a thing is instituted. The leakage of these keys will have consequences for everyone, in all countries, even if the keys are different for different countries. International communication and commerce is a commonplace daily activity for most of us now, so a breach of security anywhere can affect people everywhere.

[ryanlol]

I don't believe so. If one of those states managed to seize a US nuclear weapon, that'd be evidence of such a failure.

The specific case of protecting backdoor keys really comes down to keeping from getting physically stolen, which at least the US government should be perfectly capable of.

[natch]

Mere assertions that they "should be perfectly capable" are just vacuous statements that don't mean anything.

1) We're not just talking about the US government that will have access to keys.

2) The US government has shown itself to be perfectly capable of losing secrets. I'm not saying, as you did, they "should be." I'm saying they have proved it. So have the governments of other countries.

3) We don't know how those countries got all the information they have. We may know where some of their information came from, but not all of it.

4) NSA is supposed to be our best and brightest at protecting secrets. Look what they did.

5) Some proposals for encryption backdoors allow for access by law enforcement at almost any level, down to local sheriff / police. They would probably stop just above mall cop, if they could.

If you have a retort to just some of these points, unfortunately that doesn't fix the problem. You would have to be able to answer all of them. A leak only takes one weak point.

[ryanlol]

>We're not just talking about the US government that will have access to keys.

Well I doubt the $insert_country would want to share their keys with others. Why would they? It'd make far more sense to send in encrypted message and get decrypted message back.

>The US government has shown itself to be perfectly capable of losing secrets.

But not even remotely comparable secrets. We're essentially talking about a physical item here, not a secret you can lose without losing possession of that item.

>Some proposals for encryption backdoors allow for access by law enforcement at almost any level, down to local sheriff / police

This may present logistical challenges for handling decryption requests, but I don't see it as a huge issue for keeping the keys from leaking.

Obviously I'm not actually advocating this, I just think that you're making some rather dishonest arguments here.

[natch]

>We're essentially talking about a physical item here

I don’t even... OK, you have yourself a nice rest of your day.

[code_beers]

Not really. https://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch-code-at-...

[ryanlol]

I think at best this supports my point, despite the sloppy launch control none of these nukes were hijacked.

Extracting keys from a securely stored HSM designed to prevent key extraction should present a far bigger challenge than keying in 00000000 to launch the missiles.