Cryptography and law: The case of Brazil

Abstract

In a digitalised environment under conditions of reduced limits and boundaries between physical and virtual worlds, people’s daily activities increasingly migrate to cyberspace. For this reason, legal issues relating to encryption, deciphering and codebreaking become increasingly topical. Due to the increased vulnerability of a wide range of people to exploitation, digitalisation implies an urgent need to develop measures for preserving privacy in digital life. Increasing vulnerabilities experienced in the social environment due to the Internet and network interactions can be attributed to the erasure of boundaries between people, which is facilitated by access to their data. In terms of providing general protection to online users, digital contracts, routine bank transfers and communications serve as an example. Cryptography, which allows the encoding of a message in an unintelligible format for those who do not have the appropriate key, represents one of the safest techniques for securely transmitting information online. In order to examine the relations between law and cryptology, the present work analyses Brazilian legal acts governing cryptography. Here, as well as defining cryptography, the main objective is to determine its main aspects and key features in order to examine the main legal issues and pecularities of legal regulation. It concludes that cryptography, as a mean to protect privacy on the Internet, does not exclude the necessity of law, but, on the contrary, legal regulation is essential to provide legal certainty to the cryptographic techniques.