>We're essentially talking about a physical item here
I don’t even... OK, you have yourself a nice rest of your day.
How do you propose the keys would escape a HSM? You wouldn't keep this stuff connected to the network, so someone would have to get physical access to even attempt to attack it.
lol!
Do you even know what a HSM is? Did you consider their existence before initially commenting?
If you do know what HSMs are, do you believe that they’re all useless?
Idk where the “lol!” came from, we’re talking about extremely standard cryptographic key storage here.
You are seriously not trolling? Google “weakest link” and re-read the thread. An HSM is not magic and does not fix all the problems.
How would a government lose control of keys generated and stored within a offline HSM in a shielded room, without actually losing possession of that HSM? This is very obviously not unfeasible to implement in a secure manner.
So far you've only given examples of secrets which are really easy to lose control of, this simply isn't one.
I'm not trying to argue that this should be done, you claimed this can't be done which is obviously false
Well I doubt the $insert_country would want to share their keys with others. Why would they? It'd make far more sense to send in encrypted message and get decrypted message back.
>The US government has shown itself to be perfectly capable of losing secrets.
But not even remotely comparable secrets. We're essentially talking about a physical item here, not a secret you can lose without losing possession of that item.
>Some proposals for encryption backdoors allow for access by law enforcement at almost any level, down to local sheriff / police
This may present logistical challenges for handling decryption requests, but I don't see it as a huge issue for keeping the keys from leaking.
Obviously I'm not actually advocating this, I just think that you're making some rather dishonest arguments here.