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Last month, I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating backdoors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting backdoors, which are—of course—are terrible idea.
Also: “A Feminist Argument Against Weakening Encryption.”
EDITED TO ADD (4/14): The French proposal was voted down.
Last month, the UK government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world.
If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data.
Using a controversial power in its 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, the UK government wants Apple to re-engineer iCloud to add a “backdoor” to ADP. This is so that if, sometime in the future, UK police wanted Apple to eavesdrop on a user, it could. Rather than add such a backdoor, Apple disabled ADP in the UK market.
Should the UK government persist in its demands, the ramifications will be profound in two ways. First, Apple can’t limit this capability to the UK government, or even only to governments whose politics it agrees with. If Apple is able to turn over users’ data in response to government demand, every other country will expect the same compliance. China, for example, will likely demand that Apple out dissidents. Apple, already dependent on China for both sales and manufacturing, won’t be able to refuse.
Second: Once the backdoor exists, others will attempt to surreptitiously use it. A technical means of access can’t be limited to only people with proper legal authority. Its very existence invites others to try. In 2004, hackers—we don’t know who—breached a backdoor access capability in a major Greek cellphone network to spy on users, including the prime minister of Greece and other elected officials. Just last year, China hacked U.S. telecoms and gained access to their systems that provide eavesdropping on cellphone users, possibly including the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. That operation resulted in the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommending that everyone use end-to-end encrypted messaging for their own security.
Apple isn’t the only company that offers end-to-end encryption. Google offers the feature as well. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security. There are other end-to-end encrypted cloud storage providers. Similar levels of security are available for phones and laptops. Once the UK forces Apple to break its security, actions against these other systems are sure to follow.
It seems unlikely that the UK is not coordinating its actions with the other “Five Eyes” countries of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: the rich English-language-speaking spying club. Australia passed a similar law in 2018, giving it authority to demand that companies weaken their security features. As far as we know, it has never been used to force a company to re-engineer its security—but since the law allows for a gag order we might never know. The UK law has a gag order as well; we only know about the Apple action because a whistleblower leaked it to the Washington Post. For all we know, they may have demanded this of other companies as well. In the United States, the FBI has long advocated for the same powers. Having the UK make this demand now, when the world is distracted by the foreign-policy turmoil of the Trump administration, might be what it’s been waiting for.
The companies need to resist, and—more importantly—we need to demand they do. The UK government, like the Australians and the FBI in years past, argues that this type of access is necessary for law enforcement—that it is “going dark” and that the internet is a lawless place. We’ve heard this kind of talk since the 1990s, but its scant evidence doesn’t hold water. Decades of court cases with electronic evidence show again and again the police collect evidence through a variety of means, most of them—like traffic analysis or informants—having nothing to do with encrypted data. What police departments need are better computer investigative and forensics capabilities, not backdoors.
We can all help. If you’re an iCloud user, consider turning this feature on. The more of us who use it, the harder it is for Apple to turn it off for those who need it to stay out of jail. This also puts pressure on other companies to offer similar security. And it helps those who need it to survive, because enabling the feature couldn’t be used as a de facto admission of guilt. (This is a benefit of using WhatsApp over Signal. Since so many people in the world use WhatsApp, having it on your phone isn’t in itself suspicious.)
On the policy front, we have two choices. We can’t build security systems that work for some people and not others. We can either make our communications and devices as secure as possible against everyone who wants access, including foreign intelligence agencies and our own law enforcement, which protects everyone, including (unfortunately) criminals. Or we can weaken security—the criminals’ as well as everyone else’s.
It’s a question of security vs. security. Yes, we are all more secure if the police are able to investigate and solve crimes. But we are also more secure if our data and communications are safe from eavesdropping. A backdoor in Apple’s security is not just harmful on a personal level, it’s harmful to national security. We live in a world where everyone communicates electronically and stores their important data on a computer. These computers and phones are used by every national leader, member of a legislature, police officer, judge, CEO, journalist, dissident, political operative, and citizen. They need to be as secure as possible: from account takeovers, from ransomware, from foreign spying and manipulation. Remember that the FBI recommended that we all use backdoor-free end-to-end encryption for messaging just a few months ago.
Securing digital systems is hard. Defenders must defeat every attack, while eavesdroppers need one attack that works. Given how essential these devices are, we need to adopt a defense-dominant strategy. To do anything else makes us all less safe.
This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.
Really good—and detailed—survey of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs.)
The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a “technical capability notice” as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring it to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement.
This is a big deal, and something we in the security community have worried was coming for a while now.
The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.
In March, when the company was on notice that such a requirement might be coming, it told Parliament: “There is no reason why the U.K. [government] should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption.”
Apple is likely to turn the feature off for UK users rather than break it for everyone worldwide. Of course, UK users will be able to spoof their location. But this might not be enough. According to the law, Apple would not be able to offer the feature to anyone who is in the UK at any point: for example, a visitor from the US.
And what happens next? Australia has a law enabling it to ask for the same thing. Will it? Will even more countries follow?
This is madness.
Starting next year:
Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before—short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgrade for the security of the TLS ecosystem because it minimizes exposure time during a key compromise event.
Because we’ve done so much to encourage automation over the past decade, most of our subscribers aren’t going to have to do much in order to switch to shorter lived certificates. We, on the other hand, are going to have to think about the possibility that we will need to issue 20x as many certificates as we do now. It’s not inconceivable that at some point in our next decade we may need to be prepared to issue 100,000,000 certificates per day.
That sounds sort of nuts to me today, but issuing 5,000,000 certificates per day would have sounded crazy to me ten years ago.
This is an excellent idea.
Slashdot thread.
The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.”
No, it’s not true.
This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken wildly out of proportion.
Cryptography is safe, and will be for a long time
EDITED TO ADD (11/3): Really good explainer from Dan Goodin.
In 2018, Australia passed the Assistance and Access Act, which—among other things—gave the government the power to force companies to break their own encryption.
The Assistance and Access Act includes key components that outline investigatory powers between government and industry. These components include:
- Technical Assistance Requests (TARs): TARs are voluntary requests for assistance accessing encrypted data from law enforcement to teleco and technology companies. Companies are not legally obligated to comply with a TAR but law enforcement sends requests to solicit cooperation.
- Technical Assistance Notices (TANs): TANS are compulsory notices (such as computer access warrants) that require companies to assist within their means with decrypting data or providing technical information that a law enforcement agency cannot access independently. Examples include certain source code, encryption, cryptography, and electronic hardware.
- Technical Capability Notices (TCNs): TCNs are orders that require a company to build new capabilities that assist law enforcement agencies in accessing encrypted data. The Attorney-General must approve a TCN by confirming it is reasonable, proportionate, practical, and technically feasible.
It’s that final one that’s the real problem. The Australian government can force tech companies to build backdoors into their systems.
This is law, but near as anyone can tell the government has never used that third provision.
Now, the director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—that’s basically their FBI or MI5—is threatening to do just that:
ASIO head, Mike Burgess, says he may soon use powers to compel tech companies to cooperate with warrants and unlock encrypted chats to aid in national security investigations.
[…]
But Mr Burgess says lawful access is all about targeted action against individuals under investigation.
“I understand there are people who really need it in some countries, but in this country, we’re subject to the rule of law, and if you’re doing nothing wrong, you’ve got privacy because no one’s looking at it,” Mr Burgess said.
“If there are suspicions, or we’ve got proof that we can justify you’re doing something wrong and you must be investigated, then actually we want lawful access to that data.”
Mr Burgess says tech companies could design apps in a way that allows law enforcement and security agencies access when they request it without comprising the integrity of encryption.
“I don’t accept that actually lawful access is a back door or systemic weakness, because that, in my mind, will be a bad design. I believe you can these are clever people design things that are secure, that give secure, lawful access,” he said.
We in the encryption space call that last one “nerd harder.” It, and the rest of his remarks, are the same tired talking points we’ve heard again and again.
It’s going to be an awfully big mess if Australia actually tries to make Apple, or Facebook’s WhatsApp, for that matter, break its own encryption for its “targeted actions” that put every other user at risk.
Really interesting analysis of the American M-209 encryption device and its security.
Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegram’s encryption is and is not.
EDITED TO ADD (8/28): Another good explainer from Kaspersky.
From the Federal Register:
After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schemes: CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+.
These algorithms are part of three NIST standards that have been finalized:
NIST press release. My recent writings on post-quantum cryptographic standards.
EDITED TO ADD: Good article:
One – ML-KEM [PDF] (based on CRYSTALS-Kyber) – is intended for general encryption, which protects data as it moves across public networks. The other two –- ML-DSA [PDF] (originally known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium) and SLH-DSA [PDF] (initially submitted as Sphincs+)—secure digital signatures, which are used to authenticate online identity.
A fourth algorithm – FN-DSA [PDF] (originally called FALCON) – is slated for finalization later this year and is also designed for digital signatures.
NIST continued to evaluate two other sets of algorithms that could potentially serve as backup standards in the future.
One of the sets includes three algorithms designed for general encryption – but the technology is based on a different type of math problem than the ML-KEM general-purpose algorithm in today’s finalized standards.
NIST plans to select one or two of these algorithms by the end of 2024.
IEEE Spectrum article.
Slashdot thread.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.