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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   19252 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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How would it be leaked? It's buried in an HSM that is not connected to the internet and housed in an access-controlled vault. Just assuming a breakage of the first of those conditions (extracting a key from an HSM) utterly breaks all device security guarantees you have for all the devices you own.

This just isn't true. Microsoft can keep the signing keys for some important elements of the OS private, and those keys are only accessed extremely rarely and in specific circumstances. But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This super skeleton key that unlocks all encryption and allows you to bypass all security on financial transactions, privacy, government documents, military assets... not only is this going to be the most valuable key in the world with thousands of motivated parties trying to get access to it, there are going to be law enforcement and government requests for it on a constant basis. Think about how many warrants are served in the USA and then remember that every single one of them is going to involve someone getting access to this key. Then remember that this key is also in use everywhere else in the world - it has to be the same otherwise you've completely broken the internet and global economy by making encrypted communication between different nations impossible (it'd be illegal to have communications that don't allow access via this master key after all). So that means that every single time a Chinese, Russian, Brazilian or South African cop wants access to some communications, that vault is getting opened right back up again.

THAT is what makes it so likely to leak - this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials every single day, and it is the most valuable key in the world given that it can defeat all encryption used in financial transactions and would make fraud and financial crime as easy as pie, let alone privacy invasion and surveillance. If you think that the Chinese (or American for that matter) government is going to use this access responsibly (or just not keep their word when they say they're not making copies of the key), lmao.

This conversation is about E2EE of Facebook messages, not bank transactions. Law enforcement/government can just subpoena your bank to get your bank transactions.

this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials

Also BZZZZT. As I said, the only people that ever access this key are a small number of approved Facebook insiders. Law enforcement/government make requests (with warrants) to Facebook, but they never even touch the handle to the door of the vault that contains the computer with the HSM with the key.

But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This is why I had said:

Of course, this method would also be subject to the possibility of abuse by the small number of FB insiders who are tasked with this warrant service, but that, by the terms of the argument made above, "does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case," because in the non-E2E case, FB can also trivially abuse their access to your messages. The question here is to what extent you think FB is, itself, a threat actor, but I think the terms of the argument above stipulated that they weren't. The appropriate criticism (seen elsewhere here) is that they are.

This conversation is about E2EE of Facebook messages, not bank transactions.

Oh, my mistake then - I was under the impression that we were talking about a more general system where all encrypted communications require a law-enforcement decryption key, with Facebook being given as a specific example. If you just want to boil it down to a single company then this discussion is an uninteresting and pointless aside to the broader discussion about banning all encryption without law enforcement decryption keys.

Yeah, I don't think this conversation was ever about entirely banning all encryption. Just about major companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, who the OP was claiming have better security than you anyway. A more general encryption policy discussion would have to encompass the more varied details of smaller organizations, their capability to do security in the first place, and the respective values of the information that goes across their wires. Plus obvious economic questions like regulatory entrenchment and such.

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