Published in Mobiles

US Justice Department has another go at cracking smartphones

by on26 March 2018


Still wants to force tech companies to install backdoors to encryption

The US Department of Justice is refusing to give up on its plans to force tech companies to build tools into smartphones and other devices that would allow access to encrypted data in criminal investigations.

According to the New York Times, F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have been quietly meeting with security researchers who have been working on approaches to providing such “extraordinary access” to encrypted devices.

DoJ bigwigs are convinced that mechanisms allowing access to the data can be engineered without intolerably weakening the devices’ security against hacking. and revived talks inside the executive branch over whether to ask Congress to enact legislation mandating the access mechanisms.

The F.B.I. has been agitating for versions of such a mandate since 2010, complaining that the spreading use of encryption is eroding investigators’ ability to carry out wiretap orders and search warrants.  In 2016 the government tried to force Apple to help it break into the iPhone of one of the attackers in the terrorist assault in San Bernardino.  Later it just hacked the phone using an Apple security hole.

When the Trump administration took office, it was thought that the problem would go away. After all the Republicans were all for free speech and it was only those evil Libtards who wanted phones encrypted.  However top officials like Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. Director, have begun talking publicly about the encryptian "problem" and Trump himself has sent a memo around the White House talking about finding a solution which would enable a government to hack phones.

The renewed push is sure to be met with resistance because building an exceptional access system is a complicated engineering problem with many parts that all have to work correctly for it to be secure, and no one has a solution to it. Apple has said that it was essential to strengthen rather than weakening security protections because threats to data security were increasing every day and arguing that it was a question of “security versus security” rather than security versus privacy.

A National Academy of Sciences committee completed an 18-month study of the encryption debate, publishing a report last month. While it mostly described challenges to solving the problem, one section cited presentations by several technologists who are developing potential approaches. Named in the report was Ray Ozzie, a former chief software architect at Microsoft; Stefan Savage, a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego; and Ernie Brickell, a former chief security officer at Intel.

The trio has been participating in a series of workshops convened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Daniel Weitzner, a computer science professor. They have discussed their research with government officials, including Valerie Cofield, a senior F.B.I. science and technology official were working on encryptian “going dark” issues.

Ozzie said that the researchers recognised that “this issue is not going away” and were trying to foster “constructive dialogue” rather than declaring that no solution is possible.

One Justice Department official pointed out that it might not be necessary to come up with a foolproof system, arguing that a solution that would work for ordinary, less-savvy criminals was still worth pursuing.

 

Last modified on 26 March 2018
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