A ‘Key’ for Encryption, Even for Good Reasons, Weakens Security
This essay is part of a debate with Denise Zheng of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Encryption keeps you safe. Encryption protects your financial details and passwords when you bank online. It protects your cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers. If you encrypt your laptop—and I hope you do—it protects your data if your computer is stolen. It protects our money and our privacy.
Encryption protects the identity of dissidents all over the world. It’s a vital tool to allow journalists to communicate securely with their sources, N.G.O.s to protect their work in repressive countries, and lawyers to communicate privately with their clients. It protects our vital infrastructure: our communications network, the power grid and everything else. And as we move to the Internet of Things with its cars and thermostats and medical devices, all of which can destroy life and property if hacked and misused, encryption will become even more critical to our security.
Security is more than encryption, of course. But encryption is a critical component of security. You use strong encryption every day, and our Internet-laced world would be a far riskier place if you didn’t.
Strong encryption means unbreakable encryption. Any weakness in encryption will be exploited—by hackers, by criminals and by foreign governments. Many of the hacks that make the news can be attributed to weak or—even worse—nonexistent encryption.
The F.B.I. wants the ability to bypass encryption in the course of criminal investigations. This is known as a “back door,” because it’s a way at the encrypted information that bypasses the normal encryption mechanisms. I am sympathetic to such claims, but as a technologist I can tell you that there is no way to give the FBI that capability without weakening the encryption against all adversaries. This is crucial to understand. I can’t build an access technology that only works with proper legal authorization, or only for people with a particular citizenship or the proper morality. The technology just doesn’t work that way.
If a back door exists, then anyone can exploit it. All it takes is knowledge of the back door and the capability to exploit it. And while it might temporarily be a secret, it’s a fragile secret. Back doors are how everyone attacks computer systems.
This means that if the F.B.I. can eavesdrop on your conversations or get into your computers without your consent, so can cybercriminals. So can the Chinese. So can terrorists. You might not care if the Chinese government is inside your computer, but lots of dissidents do. As do the many Americans who use computers to administer our critical infrastructure. Back doors weaken us against all sorts of threats.
Either we build encryption systems to keep everyone secure, or we build them to leave everybody vulnerable.
Even a highly sophisticated back door that could only be exploited by nations like the United States and China today will leave us vulnerable to cybercriminals tomorrow. That’s just the way technology works: things become easier, cheaper, more widely accessible. Give the F.B.I. the ability to hack into a cell phone today, and tomorrow you’ll hear reports that a criminal group used that same ability to hack into our power grid.
The F.B.I. paints this as a trade-off between security and privacy. It’s not. It’s a trade-off between more security and less security. Our national security needs strong encryption. I wish I could give the good guys the access they want without also giving the bad guys access, but I can’t. If the F.B.I. gets its way and forces companies to weaken encryption, all of us—our data, our networks, our infrastructure, our society—will be at risk.
Categories: Computer and Information Security, Laws and Regulations