Re: [saag] keys under doormats: is our doormat ok?

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On Jul 20, 2015, at 4:55 AM, Henry B (Hank) Hotz, CISSP <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> My $.02 is that this all sounds like a rerun of the clipper chip debates. The only problem is that the proposal is (so far) so abstract that it can’t end as quickly.
> 
> For those who don’t remember, it was a chip to encrypt digital cell phone conversations so only the two parties and the NSA could decrypt them. It all came to an abrupt halt when a Japanese mathematician cracked and published how to access the back door. Thankfully, that was before any mandate had been imposed.

One big difference is that if I want to encrypt my email or web traffic there is no “chip”, unless a general-purpose CPU counts as a “chip”. They’d have to ban software encryption to make this work, and I can’t see how that would happen. All operating system distributions today come with TLS, IPsec and S/Mime. Are they going to ban Windows (up to version 10), Mac OS (up to 10.11) and all current Linux distros?

> I can’t believe that even the NSA can design a system where that won’t eventually happen for anything we put out there. I can’t believe that even the NSA can design a good enough doormat.

I don’t believe they can either, but even if they can, the way to access the back-door is going to get leaked. It doesn’t matter if they do it because they think it’s right or for money. 

> Why are we debating this all over again?

Because some governments are proposing it?

Yoav