[pavel_lishin]

The response to your devil's advocate argument is: giving you the keys is not actually a solution, because now every foreign government is racing to break, steal or buy those keys, and not only can we not guarantee that it won't happen, but we can't even discover if it happens, or when. We can build a secret entrance, but we cannot guard it!

[EGreg]

Why can’t they know when someone uses the secret keys?

Perhaps the messages would be individually encrypted and the keys would need to be used in order to retrieve the message encryption keys. And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case.

[DexesTTP]

The point is that today, the key isn't in Google's or Amazon's or Meta's servers, but on the phones of people. That means that you literally don't have the key if you don't have the phone. And governments don't want that, they want the keys in order to eavesdrop but without being noticed (and stealing the phone would get you noticed).

So your only option to comply with this is to remove the phone-only key storage option and move all of the key into your servers, which is what we talk about when we mean "breaking end-to-end encryption".

The issue is that to comply with the rules, you have to secure that server so only the good guys can get in, and only if the warrant is legit, but also to allow fast access for time-sensitive cases such as terrorism and secret cases such as NSA investigations. You also have to make sure that there's absolutely no way for people to access that server if they don't have the approval.

Oh, and also that server / these servers contain the keys to read every message from every citizen of your country (including politicians), which is probably worth as much of your GDP.

So you need to build the equivalent of a safe containing one trillion dollars that can't be accessed for any reason except all of the reasons mentioned abov3. Except that this theoretical trillion of dollars are special dollars where if you mess up and let people in without anyone noticing they got in, they can "steal" the trillion dollars and start spending them and nobody would notice that they're being spent. And there's just about every country on earth that would love to "borrow" your two trillion dollars, especially if you can't ever realistically prove they did it.

Easy, right?

[ethbr1]

Has there ever been a public key sign-countersign encrypted tap method?

I.e. Authorized tap requestors have keys (law enforcement, intelligence) and sign a request (including timestamp), storing a copy for audit.

The approval system (courts, FISA) validates that request, countersigns if they approve (including timestamp), storing a copy for audit.

The system owners (messaging services, etc.) then validate both signatures and provide the requested tap information, creating a tap record (including content scope and timestamp), storing a copy for audit.

Ideally, then all audit logs get publicly published, albeit redacted as needed for case purposes.

Part of the central issue is deciding "Who should be responsible for security?" Imho, if governments want to mandate a scheme like this, it sure as shit shouldn't be the tech companies. The government should have to manage its own keys, or deal with consequences of leaking them (while allowing the tech companies to retain independent records of individual requests).

As much as it pains me to say this... this wouldn't be the worst use case for a blockchain...

[EGreg]

Something like this?

https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

[ethbr1]

Yes! Exactly like what you've apparently thought about and worked on for a long time. Neat!

>> To decrypt it, multiple parties need to come together and combine their keys, all the while creating an audit log of why they are accessing this or that portion.

To me, this is the technical solution that best mirrors the ideals of the pre-technical reality.

And I consider myself an encryption absolutist! But I think the powers arrayed against it are too strong (and in some areas, too morally correct) to fully resist.

Which devolves to creating a compromise, and hopefully one better than "Government has no keys, any of the time" or "Government has all keys, all the time."

[pavel_lishin]

So instead of stealing a single key, the FSB has to steal three?

[pavel_lishin]

And what happens when the NSA or the FSB or some other equivalent just breaks into where the keys are stored, or beats it out of an employee, and bypasses the entire logging mechanism?

Your security guard having a clipboard where everyone signs in at the gate doesn't matter if someone dug a hole under the fence.

[ethbr1]

You mean when the {other nation's foreign intelligence agency} penetrates {nation's intelligence agency} and {nation's court system}?

And still creates a logging trail because the log system is intrinsically linked to fulfilling a request?

[DexesTTP]

"Intrinsically linked" doesn't exist. Encryption is math, math you can do on a piece of paper (in theory). Anything you set up to log the fact that people did that math is always going to be meaningless if people take the numbers and do the math away from your logging system.

Now, you can say "but you can't ever access the numbers, just order the computer to do the operation". And also "To order the operation, you need 2FA and a signature for a judge and the president". And, of course, "The numbers needed for decrypting are split between three different servers all with their own security system and they can't be forced to talk to each other without the president's signature being added to a public log". And that's all well and good, but consider this: I install a listener on the RAM of each of the three servers. I wait until it does a totally legit, totally approved thing that gets logged. I now have the numbers copied somewhere. I do the decrypting for everything else away from the servers.

Sounds like a difficult operation? You're talking about three numbers worth a trillion dollars if they ever get out. Spy missions have been done that were harder to pull off for less benefit.

You just thought of [technical solution] to prevent listening through the RAM? Great, you just solved one _very obvious_ part of the attack surface. Now to address the ten thousand other parts identified by your threat model, and I really hope that you did a perfect job while designing that threat model because one blind spot = all of the keys are out forever. Also, no pressure, but your team of 10 or 100 or even 1000 people working on that threat model are immediately going to be pit against teams of the same size from every government ever, so I hope your team has the best and most amazing engineers we'll ever see in the world. And that's not considering the human aspect of all of that, because, well, one mole during the deployment, one developer paid enough by an adversary to do an "accidental" typo that leaves a security hole, one piece of open-source software getting supply chain attacked during deployment, and your threat model is moot.

[DexesTTP]

The issue is that whatever "audit" or "protection" method you create, whatever technology you use to ensure only the "good guys" get the information and the "bad guys" can't, it's only layers added on top of the real issue:

The final key is always going to be a single number. Once the key is out, it's out. There's nothing you can do about it being out, and no way to know it's out unless your audit system somehow caught it beforehand.

And that key (or these keys, which doesn't change much between "one number" and "two billion numbers" in terms of difficulty of stealing or storing them) is going to be worth trillions of dollars.

Again, the bank vault thing is an apt analogy (up to a point): You can add all of the security "around" the vault, guard rounds, advanced infrared sensors, reinforced concrete with weaved kevlar in it, etc... But if someone ever gets the dollar bills in their hands, then they got the bills. And if they somehow manage to bypass the security systems and not get noticed as they go in for the steal, you have no way to know who they are or that they did it.

Now, that is completely fine for a standard bank vault: after all, you need to physically send someone in, it's pretty rare for people to actually want in the vault so security can be pretty slow and involved, it doesn't have that much "money" inside (I'm pretty sure no bank vault in the world contains more than a handful of millions at any given time), and above all it's "physical" stuff inside: you'd immediately see if it's gone, it's not like someone who got in the vault can "magically" copy the bank notes and leave with the money while leaving the vault seemingly intact.

It's less fine for a "server" vault, where not only do you store everything so it's worth trillions, but people need to access it all the time because "investigations" and "warrants", and in a fast way because "terrorism", and if there's a breach or a mole or anything like that then people can copy all of the data inside and leave the server seemingly intact.

I think thinking that there's a technical solution is misunderstanding the problem, and that anyone pretending they "solved" it are always going to minimize one risk or the other. The governments and regulators don't get that yet, because it looks like it's just a technological issue to build "the vault". But the real issue, the fact that "the vault" doesn't matter when the consequences of stealing the contents of the vault are risk-free for bad guys but so immensely impactful for citizens, is the reason why technical solutions won't ever be enough.

[ethbr1]

I understand the analogies.

What I don't understand is, in the absence of some sort of scheme, how a justice system functions.

How would you compel production of evidence when duly authorized?

[pavel_lishin]

> And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case.

The scenario I'm talking about isn't overly-broad warrants, etc. Technology can't prevent that. I'm talking about just the tech implementation.

Fine, we have a private keypair for every message, and every message is additionally encrypted with the public key of the government-per-message-keypair.

How are these per-message keypairs generated? If from a central server, then that becomes a massive weakpoint in the system for multiple reasons: it could be attacked to prevent new keypairs from being generated, it could be hacked to extract private keys, it could be modified to generate keypairs that an adversary can easily break, it could be modified to also send private keys to adversaries, etc., etc.

If they're generated on-client, and the secret key is sent to some central repository, then the client or the device the client is running on could be compromised; the private keypairs could be intercepted en-route; the central repository could _still_ be compromised since it can't be airgapped to receive these keypairs.

In the case of a warrant, how is each key actually fetched? I don't mean the legal process, I mean at some point someone has to push a button and decrypt a message. How do we protect that process? Besides the fact that even air-gapped systems can be vulnerable to a sufficiently motivated and well-funded adversary, at some point some human being has to have access to this system, and that human being probably has family members. How vulnerable are they to being beaten with rubber hoses, or receiving their spouse's fingers in the mail?

If you're going to build a system that can expose everyone's private communications, it better be incredibly close to fool-proof, or it better not be built at all.

[peoplefromibiza]

> because now every foreign government is racing to break, steal or buy those keys

it's much easier and much cheaper to simply steal the phone (maybe phones?) containing the keys. Or hack it (them?).

And then calmly search through the phone's backup.

That's what I would try first if I was in charge of such a task.

[nonethewiser]

Yeah but he's not saying it's OK. Just that they could do it.