Re: [Gendispatch] Updated draft: Policy experts are IETF stakeholders

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2023, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
>> clear understanding of the technology. That's how you end up with
>> cryptographers repeatedly explaining why we can't put back doors in
>> cryptosystems and policy people telling us we have to, just nerd
>> harder.
>
> Don't misunderstand me, I do think that backdoors in crypto are a bad 
> idea, but: is the cryptographers' explanation of why we can't have them 
> a technical or a policy argument? I always understood it as "if we do, 
> there is no way to eliminate the risk that they will fall into the wrong 
> hands", but whether that risk is acceptable or not and under which 
> conditions is a policy decision, not a technical one.

I think it's more a persistent misunderstanding of what the risks are.

Law enforcement has a century of experience with wiretaps.  They have a 
gradual failure model.  If I lie to a judge or bribe a phone tech, I can 
get taps on a few phone lines but I can't listen in to the entire phone 
system.  As we all know, software isn't like that, often fails 
catastrophically, and we have no way to ensure any particular piece of 
software doesn't have catastrophic bugs.  Putting the software in hardware 
doesn't help.  The 1990s Clipper chip which was supposed to provide a 
controlled key escrow designed by the NSA turned out to have bugs that 
made it easy to evode the escrow.

Phill recently sent a message listing the impossible set of questions 
you'd have to answer to build a backdoored system.  But if you believe 
that the wiretap model is the way things work, you don't have to answer 
any of those questions.  You just have to tell the nerds to nerd harder 
and build something that fails like wiretaps do.

So far we have largely failed to get policy people to understand the way 
software fails and how to evaluate its risks.  To some extent that's 
because they don't want to, but there's not much we can do about that.

Blog post here: https://jl.ly/Internet/catastrophe.html

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly