Why cryptography fail

The real issue with encryption may simply be that the FBI has to use more resources when they encounter it than when they don't. Indeed, Bellovin argues: "Time has also shown that the government has almost always managed to go around encryption. It is true that the spread of encryption technologies will add to the burden of those in government who are charged with carrying out certain law enforcement and intelligence activities.

But the many benefits to society of widespread commercial and private use of cryptography outweigh the disadvantages. The mere fact that law enforcement's job may become a bit more difficult is not a sufficient reason for undermining the privacy and security of hundreds of millions of innocent people around the world who will be helped by mobile disk encryption.

Or as Chief Justice of John Roberts recently observed in another case rejecting law enforcement's broad demands for access to the information available on our mobile phones: "Privacy comes at a cost. Facebook needs to be reined in.

Lawmakers and everyday users are mad, having heard former Facebook employee Frances Haugen explain how Facebook valued growth and engagement over everything else, even health and safety. We need This post is the first of two analyzing the risks of approving dangerous and disproportionate surveillance obligations in the Brazilian Fake News bill.

You can read our second article here. We get a lot of requests for help here at EFF, with our tireless intake coordinator being the first point of contact for many. Instead, users just need an answer to a simple question: what does this company With great influence comes great responsibility. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms make many questionable, confounding, and often downright incorrect decisions affecting speakers of all political stripes.

For many years, Palestinian rights defenders have championed the cause of Palestinians in the occupied territories, who are denied access to PayPal, while Israeli settlers have full access to PayPal products. A recent campaign , led by Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh , calls on PayPal to adhere to its EFF filed an amicus brief in the U. We argued that Supreme Court precedent makes clear that the First Amendment rarely All because In a win for freedom of speech, the U.

EFF filed an amicus brief in My conditions are but a drop in a dark sea of injustice. Join EFF Lists. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Nine Epic Failures of Regulating Cryptography. Commentary by Cindy Cohn. For those who weren't following digital civil liberties issues in , or for those who have forgotten, here's a refresher list of why forcing companies to break their own privacy and security measures by installing a back door was a bad idea 15 years ago: It will create security risks.

Don't take our word for it. Computer security expert Steven Bellovin has explained some of the problems. First, it's hard to secure communications properly even between two parties. Cryptography with a back door adds a third party, requiring a more complex protocol, and as Bellovin puts it: "Many previous attempts to add such features have resulted in new, easily exploited security flaws rather than better law enforcement access.

Bellovin notes: Complexity in the protocols isn't the only problem; protocols require computer programs to implement them, and more complex code generally creates more exploitable bugs. It won't stop the bad guys. Users who want strong encryption will be able to get it — from Germany, Finland, Israel, and many other places in the world where it's offered for sale and for free. Here's what they said: Products using unescrowed encryption are in use today by millions of users, and such products are available from many difficult-to-censor Internet sites abroad.

It will harm innovation. In order to ensure that no "untappable" technology exists, we'll likely see a technology mandate and a draconian regulatory framework. The implications of this for America's leadership in innovation are dire. Could Mark Zuckerberg have built Facebook in his dorm room if he'd had to build in surveillance capabilities before launch in order to avoid government fines?

Would Skype have ever happened if it had been forced to include an artificial bottleneck to allow government easy access to all of your peer-to-peer communications? This has especially serious implications for the open source community and small innovators.

Some open source developers have already taken a stand against building back doors into software. Decisions made in the design process might be completely ignored when it comes time to sell it to customers. A system that is secure when the operators are trusted and the computers are completely under the control of the company using the system may not be secure when the operators are temps hired at just over minimum wage and the computers are untrusted.

Good trust models work even if some of the trust assumptions turn out to be wrong. Users may not report missing smart cards for a few days, in case they are just misplaced. They may not carefully check the name on a digital certificate.

They may reuse their secure passwords on other, insecure systems. Strong systems are designed to keep small security breaks from becoming big ones.

Recovering the key to one file should not allow the attacker to read every file on the hard drive. A hacker who reverse-engineers a smart card should only learn the secrets in that smart card, not information that will help him break other smart cards in the system.

If the on-line credit card verification system is down, merchants will default to the less-secure paper system. Other systems have no ability to recover from disaster. For electronic commerce systems, which could have millions of users, this can be particularly damaging.

Such systems should plan to respond to attacks, and to upgrade security without having to shut the system down. Good system design considers what will happen when an attack occurs, and works out ways to contain the damage and recover from the attack. Sometimes, products even get the cryptography wrong. Some rely on proprietary encryption algorithms.

Invariably, these are very weak. Counterpane has had considerable success breaking published encryption algorithms; our track record against proprietary ones is even better. The system for DVD encryption took a weak algorithm and made it weaker.

Most cryptographic systems rely on prevention as their sole means of defense: the cryptography keeps people from cheating, lying, abusing, or whatever. Defense should never be that narrow. A strong system also tries to detect abuse and to contain the effects of any attack. One of our fundamental design principles is that sooner or later, every system will be successfully attacked, probably in a completely unexpected way and with unexpected consequences.

It is important to be able to detect such an attack, and then to contain the attack to ensure it does minimal damage. More importantly, once the attack is detected, the system needs to recover: generate and promulgate a new key pair, update the protocol and invalidate the old one, remove an untrusted node from the system, etc. Counterpane has done considerable work in securing audit logs in electronic commerce systems, mostly in response to system designs that could fail completely in the event of a successful attack.

These systems have to do more than detect an attack: they must also be able to produce evidence that can convince a judge and jury of guilt. Attackers, on the other hand, only need to find one security flaw in order to defeat the system. And they can cheat. They can collude, conspire, and wait for technology to give them additional tools. They can attack the system in ways the system designer never thought of. Building a secure cryptographic system is easy to do badly, and very difficult to do well.

In other areas of computer science, functionality serves to differentiate the good from the bad: a good compression algorithm will work better than a bad one; a bad compression program will look worse in feature-comparison charts.

Cryptography is different. Functionality does not equal quality, and no amount of beta testing will ever reveal a security flaw. Categories: Computer and Information Security , Trust. Is an insecure mode of operation such as ECB in use? Is encryption used when authenticated encryption is more appropriate? Are passwords being used as cryptographic keys in absence of a password base key derivation function?

Is randomness used for cryptographic purposes that was not designed to meet cryptographic requirements? Are deprecated hash functions such as MD5 or SHA1 in use, or are non-cryptographic hash functions used when cryptographic hash functions are needed? Are cryptographic error messages or side channel information exploitable, for example in the form of padding oracle attacks? Classify data processed, stored, or transmitted by an application.

Identify which data is sensitive according to privacy laws, regulatory requirements, or business needs. Don't store sensitive data unnecessarily. Data that is not retained cannot be stolen. Ensure up-to-date and strong standard algorithms, protocols, and keys are in place; use proper key management. Encrypt all data in transit with secure protocols such as TLS with forward secrecy FS ciphers, cipher prioritization by the server, and secure parameters. Store passwords using strong adaptive and salted hashing functions with a work factor delay factor , such as Argon2, scrypt, bcrypt or PBKDF2.

Initialization vectors must be chosen appropriate for the mode of operation. In all cases, the IV should never be used twice for a fixed key. Keys should be generated cryptographically randomly and stored in memory as byte arrays.

If a password is used, then it must be converted to a key via an appropriate password base key derivation function.