As if anybody here needs a reason to be wary of what you do online, this essay shares how a foreign adversary used back doors that were intentionally put in place to spy on Americans and how the rest of the world probably has the same back doors.
I especially appreciate the phrase “nerd harder” and the quote, “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”.
How can IT folk help politicans to understand?
What’s the outrage? Those backdoors were made for governmental use. The only thing is that it was not made for foreign government use, but hey, that is just due to the incompetence of those who designed the backdoor…
So the blunders of US agencies did harm to millions of people. Lawsuits, anyone?
Eh?
You can’t build an unpickable back door into a computer system.
You can’t break encryption for only the good guys.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Encryption only works when there is one decryption key. If there are two different keys then it isn’t encrypted bad actors will find a way in
That is 100% correct. Nonetheless, the US agencies assumed that they were smarter than basically all of the security community and common sense.
except the intentions werent any good either.
whenever you encrypt something, encrypt with both the intended public key and the fbi’s public key. and send the one encrypted with the fbi’s key to the fbi.
No outrage, just a reminder to encrypt, VPN or whatever to protect yourself from surveillance.
I don’t like your phrase, “incompetence of those who designed the backdoor”. I was not in the room, but in my mind, the execs said “build a back door for the govn’t” and the engineers said “you can’t do that JUST for one party” then the execs said “do it anyways or get fired, we’re getting fistfulls of cash to do it” and the engineers said “I enjoy feeding my family, it’s your company anyways” and did it.
IIRC the backdoor design and keys came from the agencies, not the companies.