Another Senate bill that intends to regulate encryption in private devices is in the works.
Staffers for the Senate Judiciary Committee have been speaking with representatives of large U.S. technology companies in recent months to receive feedback for potential future legislation, three people familiar with the matter told CyberScoop. These representatives have so far included trade group associations and lobbyists for technology vendors.
Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton has reignited the Coalition's push to access encrypted communications, touting decryption as fundamental in fighting terrorism, ahead of the Australia-ASEAN Special Summit next month.
Addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday, Dutton labelled "ubiquitous encryption" a "significant obstacle" to terrorism investigations.
"I am confident that the government has given our agencies the best tools to do the job, but as terrorists -- and other criminals -- evolve their tactics, so must we," he said.
Since its inception, Skype has been notable for its secretive, proprietary algorithm. It's also long had a complicated relationship with encryption: encryption is used by the Skype protocol, but the service has never been clear exactly how that encryption was implemented or exactly which privacy and security features it offers.
In recent testimony before Congress, the director of the FBI has again highlighted what the government sees as the problem of easy-to-use, on-by-default, strong encryption.
In prepared remarks from last Thursday, FBI director Christopher Wray said that encryption presents a "significant challenge to conducting lawful court-ordered access," he said, again using the longstanding government moniker "Going Dark."
The statement was just one portion of his testimony about the agency's priorities for the coming year.
Stop me if you've heard this before. You text a friend to finalize plans, anxiously awaiting their reply, only to get a message from them on Snapchat to say your latest story was hilarious. So, you move the conversation over to Snapchat, decide to meet up at 10:30, but then you close the app and can't remember if you agreed on meeting at Hannegan's or that poppin' new brewery downtown. You can't go back and look at the message since Snapchat messages have a short shelf life, so you send a text, but your friend has already proven to be an unreliable texter.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a conference of law enforcement officials on Sunday that he and his colleagues have been unable to open nearly 7,000 digital devices in the first 11 months of the 2017 fiscal year.
Once again there are indications the UK government intends to use the law to lean on encryption. A report in The Sun this week quoted a Conservative minister saying that should the government be re-elected, which polls suggest it will, it will move quickly to compel social media firms to hand over decrypted data.
At the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, the basement of the physics building is connected to the economics building by nearly half a mile’s worth of optical fiber. It takes a photon three millionths of a second—and a physicist, about five minutes—to travel from one building to the other. Starting in November 2015, researchers beamed individual photons between the buildings, over and over again for seven months, for a physics experiment that could one day help secure your data.
In the four tumultuous weeks since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the White House has provided a steady stream of leaks. Some are mostly innocuous, like how Trump spends his solitary hours. Others, including reports of national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unauthorized talks with Russia, have proven devastating. In response, Trump has launched an investigation, and expressed his displeasure in a tweet: “Why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?”
“Many of the algorithms used in cryptography for encryption, decryption, and authentication are complicated, especially when asymmetric, public key cryptography is being used," said Peter Bright on Monday in Ars Technica. "Over the years, these complexities have resulted in a wide range of bugs in real crypto libraries and the software that uses them."
Bright was giving us a bigger picture view in light of the good news from Google. On Monday Google announced the release of Project Wycheproof. This should ease some pain.
