Yeah, I believe the author mistakenly conflated public-key cryptography with the public-key infrastructure (PKI). One is a technology and the other is a set of policies built around a trust model. While the technology remains sound, our confidence in the policies may be weakening. To prepare for this, we may need to look at alternative trust models such as web of trust.
This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Users need to take more responsibility for guarding their own privacy. I think there are a lots of business opportunities here: easy to use tools that keep control entirely in Alice's and Bob's hands and public key cryptography is certainly part of the solution.
Therefore, if you have, use and keep secret your own keys, the best-resourced intruders cannot practicably get your data.
Of course, http://xkcd.com/538/
> I've been thinking quite a lot about that exact thing as well. There must be a way to build great commercial tools that are also truly secure. I'd love to discuss further. Contact info in my profile.
'state', to solicit this collaboration, would it not be prudent to init a new HN account under a different name?
This article talks about the many ways public key can be circumvented, but offers no insight into a mathematical breakthrough. Thus, there will remain a way to encrypt your data, you just need to make sure your keys will always be safe.
The implication is simple and frightening -- classify it as munitions and making illegal to possess.
Remember that Constitution also allows one to have arms. Well arms in 1700s was rifle and that was a top weapon whether for government infantry or dissenting militants. What happened, you can still own arms but you can't own ICBMs, air-2-surface missiles, attack helicopters, nuclear devices etc. So as you can see just because something seems so inalienable, it can still be easily taken (not saying use of public crypto is a Constitutional right, just making a comparison between obvious rights easily stripped away).
Not only that, many country do make it illegal to have crypto software. It is not an outlandish proposition.
It won't take much to drum up support. Just need 3-4 high profile cases of: terrorists or child molesters using PGP and Joe Sixpack would be pretty easily convinced to call his representative and ask him to vote to make such "enabling tools" illegal.
You know we went through this in the 1990s and PGP was declassified as a munition, yes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...
Before taking the claims at face value it's good to do a bit of background research. Also, I generally find anything where every paragraph consists only of a single sentence can safely be ignored.
> Before taking the claims at face value it's good to do a bit of background research.
It also good to read and understand the whole comment before replying. I didn't say it is illegal (in US, it is in other countries) I said it is not an unreasonably hard step to take.
As any browser has to integrate some sort of public-key cryptography support to use HTTPS, and as HTTPS is pretty useful for things like sending your credit card number over an insecure channel, I very much doubt that the genie could be put back in the bottle now.
Edit: Realistically if you want secure peer to peer communications your protocalls has to survive when 40+% of peers are compromised and well good luck with that at scale. This seems like a reasonable problem but you also need to be able to revoke certificats.
Note: that is (besides the 51% attack vector) the primary reason the bigger parts of the crypto scene won't call bitcoin truly secure. Because there is still a risk of insecurity, it is just abysmally small, and disrupting one node doesn't mean the degradation of the web of trust because as long as the majority still agrees on the correct state of affairs (and as a false block chain diverges it becomes more expensive to maintain that public facing fork to disrupt other clients).
No evidence in the article substantiates this bold statement.
- "pressuring major Internet firms to provide their "master" SSL keys for government surveillance purposes": this demonstrates a weakness of centralized public-key infrastructures, it does not follow that public-key cryptography is doomed. (See: web of trust.)
- wiretaps, snooping, etc.: everyone is welcome to grab a copy of the ciphertext, this does not prove that cryptography is futile -- quite the contrary.
- "concerns about the security of widely used cipher algorithms and a range of other associated exploits": vague.
- "it is prudent to at least assume that intelligence agencies around the globe may still be working several steps ahead of public "state of the art" in crypto tech": unfalsifiable.
- "forced the hands of chip manufacturers to include "special goodies" for surveillance purposes": I am willing to fear deliberate plausibly deniable weaknesses on accelerated hardware implementation of crypto primitives, e.g., PRNGs, but it seems very hard to believe that implementations of public-key crypto using general purpose instructions could be somehow identified by the CPU and somehow tampered with in a way which would be non-obvious somehow.
- "when governments really want to target someone, they'll find some way to compromise the associated computers directly -- either through phishing or other malware attacks, or via in-person "black bag" jobs to physically alter systems as they might feel appropriate": humans are the weakest part of cryptosystems, and if they have physical access then they win; nothing new here.
In conclusion:
> I believe it would be fully appropriate for us to be considering alternative methodologies for data protection that are sufficiently outside the existing public-key "box"
Public-key cryptography is a tool. It certainly does not form, in itself, a full "methodology for data protection", but nothing in the article justifies that has lost any usefulness in its current form.