Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • April 24, 2023 8:54 AM

@ ALL,

The proposals are “idiocy of the highest order”.

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly if people want secure end to end encryption then all they have to do is move the “privacy end point” past the “communications end point”.

The current range of user devices are designed such that the privacy end point is inside the communications end point device.

This means that an “attacker of your privacy” can end-run around your privacy end point to the plaintext interface or storage.

The solution take the privacy end point off of the communications end point device.

Obviously this is not as convenient for users, which should tell every one who’s privacy is being targeted.

Because after the likes of EuroChat etc backdoored phones pushed into the criminal fraternity, the smarter criminals will have either read this advice in a book detailing encryption in the 1970’s or earlier for diplomatic / military protection or worked it out for themselves.

But something else to consider.

You can hide private messages in public messages using “codes”.

Have people sat down and thought just how little effort would be required to turn the likes of a LLM into a “code book” to generate such messages in a way that the same message plaintext would always be different?

Yup welcome to a new world of possabilities that legislators have not thought about…

Clive Robinson • April 24, 2023 8:03 PM

@ iAPX, ALL,

Re : Establishing Trust.

“Mutual authentication is a problem, and today with AI impersonification technologies, I don’t see how it is possible to create a secure channel to someone else that is not in front of me.”

The only way to start the process is by the first and second parties establishing a “Root of Trust” that,

1, Is shared by only the 1st&2nd parties.
2, Not known by any other parties.
3, Not guessable, calcuable, or obtained by some defect by any other party.

Rules one and two these days in effect require a secure side channel for the secret to be shared. Which effectively needs that private face to face meeting of “in front of me”.

Why is this the case? Well the simple fact is other methods we currently use are based on the assumption of a “One Way Function”(OWF) that also has a secret short cut or “trapdoor”. Nobody has actually proved that such functions can exist and be secure. Worse it’s now assumed that the current functions will fail when “Quantum Cryptography”(QC) becomes practical.

Currently we don’t know if QC ever will become practical it may not to the scale required. However a cautious person would not take the risk, thus seek alternative methods, that so far have also proved problematic.

As some know the Chinese Government have decided that mathmatical theorems are just one way to go and to investigate other methods that rely on the laws of physics as we currently understand them to get a level of secrecy equivalent to a “One Time Pad”(OTP) using quanum methods. Proved functional back in 1984 “Quantum Key Distribution”(QKD) has slowly been overcoming it’s inherant issues. The Chinese government have put into space on a satellite in LEO one part of a QKD system.

But these systems including in person face to face exchange does not solve all the problems in rule 3 of,

1, Not guessable.
2, Not calcuable.
3, No vulnerabilities.

It has been argued in the past that a shared secret needs to be atleast 128bits in size to be non guessable in a reasonable period of time. Others disagree and argue for twice that number of bits.

However some now consider 16384bits to be required for certain key sizes with some “Post Quantum Computing”(PQC) algorithms needing key sizes so large, they are bigger than the ASCII equivalent of a paperback book…

But… there is a problem I’ve mentioned before, which is,

“How do you generate such large numbers of bits without their being some form of vulnerability?”

The simple answer is “We don’t know”, because all physical processes have “bias” or “non random signals present” and other defects. We used to talk of “flipping fair coins” then some people came up with a way to make the flipping of even a fair coin fairly determanistic. Other attacks have been found on other supposadly “fair” systems. We know the NSA have taken advantage of “random number generator systems” atleast two that were Psudo-Random but assumed to be “Cryptographicaly Secure”(CS) and a large number of alledgedly “True Random Generators” because the level of entropy was woefully inadequate when used to generate “Roots of Trust” for PubKey Certs etc.

Worse the generation of PubKey certs can be “backdoored” in ways that can not be spotted by examining the P&Q primes or their multiple. Something Adam Young and Moti Yung worked out how to do decades ago… and others like Niels Ferguson have come up with other methods.

Thus the question arises of,

“Can we trust our roots of trust?”

To which the honest reply is,

“Unless you can carefully and knowledgeably control every step in the process you can not.”

The problem of course is “can you ever know enough?”.

Clive Robinson • April 24, 2023 8:50 PM

@ critical,

Re : Proverbial bad faith penny.

“but doing it anyway,”

And you are just making things worse, yet again under your sock-puppet handle.

It’s fairly clear that you have an agenda, that is nothing what so ever to do with the subjects relating to this blog, but a personal embitterment. You do you comment constructively as witnessed by your past posts that are still visable. In fact you only comment in response, and in an ad hominem form, which you’ve been told before is bad debating form.

As for your handle, it’s clear you do not have anything aproaching “critical reasoning” abilities, and people realy should start to wonder who does your homework for you.

After all,

“Before falling for this populist conspiracy theory narrative, you could first read the first draft…”

You can’t even get that right can you?

Politico released a leak of a much more interesting version, that’s something like twice the size,

Politico4April2023.pdf

Clive Robinson • April 25, 2023 6:57 AM

@ FA, ALL,

Re : Automod issues.

“Can you provide a working link ?”

You might have noticed I had automod issues the other day that may have been related to the inclusion of just one or two links.

Therefor I’m trying to provide an alternative via giving sufficient information to use even with Duckduckgo / Bing.

The file name is unique as far as I can tell –via Bing– and the inclusion of “politico” and “zero draft”[1] should be sufficient to find one or more articles that link to it on the likes of “keionline” on their page about “Media coverage of the WHO pandemic treaty negotiations” on their site in the “org” domain.

[1] Unlike claimed by someone above it’s not yet at the “First Draft” stage, hence “zero draft”. There are a lot of nations agitating to change things the EU especially has come in for a raised eyebrow, and in a rare sign of collective desires both Russia and the US want the NSA’s and NGO’s locked out of the process even as spectators (a sure sign that no good is intended much like those oh so super secret trade deals the Obama administration tried to push down everyones throats with the realy nasty dispute resolution process only US Corporates were invited in to propose etc).