Re: [arch-d] Time to reboot RFC1984 and RFC2804?

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

> On 13 Oct 2020, at 14:17, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> On 13/10/2020 13:48, Stewart Bryant wrote:
>> 
>> Stephen,
>> 
>> Those governments are looking for ways to stop real harm to real
>> people.
> 
> Some are, yes. That is not all they are interested in doing
> of course (they all do like a bit of spying here and there:-)
> and all that varies enormously from one to another government.
> Some governments want these changes in order to do what I would
> call harm.

Engineering calls for a pragmatic balance of results and costs.

From where I sit, I see a significant downside in allowing bad people to do bad things to innocent people.

> 
>> 
>> We have to accept that we have unintentionally played a part in
>> causing some of that harm.
> 
> And a lot of good. IMO, on balance, and after having done
> this stuff for >3 decades, I'm happy that we've done overall
> far more good (with crypto in protocols) than harm. (That
> doesn't include surveillance capitalism, but that isn't the
> same issue.)
> 
>> So the problem that we have a moral responsibility to address is to
>> find methods that stop or minimise those harms.
> 
> I don't accept that. The "we" isn't clear, but what
> does seem clear is that meeting the requirements posed
> is (IMO anyway) likely to do more harm. I've never
> seen any proponent of borked crypto do a proper analysis
> of the damage that would be done - they almost always
> seem to approach it as mostly a PR exercise and so go
> straight to the "think of the children" and "what about
> the terrorists" talking points.

Well I am certainly concerned about those two groups.

So the interesting question is whether there is any other way of addressing the requirement without borking the crypto, at least for the majority of applications used by those causing the harm.

> 
>> The problem may be hard but so were many other problems that we now
>> take for granted as solved.
> 
> I didn't say "hard." I said "squaring the circle." The
> latter isn't possible and is much more like the "magic"
> that is being asked for, and has been asked for since
> the Clipper days, without any technical progress at all
> in those 25 years.

Are, but that is my point. Maybe we cannot exactly square the circle, but perhaps, if we look at the problem in the right way we can create a sufficiently close approximation that it satisfies the requirement?

Stewart



> 
> S.
> 
>> 
>> Stewart
>> 
>> 
>> 
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