Keys under doormats: mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications

Abelson, Harold; Anderson, Ross; Bellovin, Steven M.; Benaloh, Josh; Blaze, Matt; Diffie, Whitfield; Gilmore, John F.; Green, Matthew; Landau, Susan; Neumann, Peter G.; Rivest, Ronald L.; Schiller, Jeffrey I.; Schneier, Bruce; Specter, Michael A.; Weitzner, Daniel J.

doi:10.1093/cybsec/tyv009

Cited by 91 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The technical community, for example, has strenuously sought to make the case that common approaches to ensuring national security in a digital world may actually undermine the security of computer networks and the data that resides on them (Abelson et al 2015). Perhaps the most important point is that no actor will get all of what it wants, for the simple reason that achieving some ends (and attaining some values) can only be done at the expense of others.…”

Section: Cyber Futures and Value Tradeoffsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber Futures and the Justice Motive: Avoiding Pyrrhic Victory

Raymond¹

2018

MCA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Cyber Futures and Value Tradeoffsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber Futures and the Justice Motive: Avoiding Pyrrhic Victory

Raymond¹

2018

MCA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Policymakers in general favor strong encryption with exceptional, warrant-based access while the tech community replies that the mathematics either support secure encryption without government backdoors or exceptional access with significantly less security. The combination of both secure cryptography and governmental access represents wishful thinking or the search for a magic pony solution (Abelson et al, 2015).…”

Section: Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies on the crypto-wars debate tend to be either technical (see Abelson et al, 2015;Dam & Lin, 1996) or historical (Kehl et al, 2015). Empirical securitization studies, which focus on digital technologies, tend to ignore the potential material impact of discourses, as Dunn Cavelty argues (Dunn Cavelty, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clipper Meets Apple vs. FBI—A Comparison of the Cryptography Discourses from 1993 and 2016

Schulze

2017

MaC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article analyzes two cryptography discourses dealing with the question of whether governments should be able to monitor secure and encrypted communication, for example via security vulnerabilities in cryptographic systems. The Clipper chip debate of 1993 and the FBI vs. Apple case of 2016 are analyzed to infer whether these discourses show similarities in their arguments and to draw lessons from them. The study is based on the securitization framework and analyzes the social construction of security threats in political discourses. The findings are that the arguments made by the proponents of exceptional access show major continuities between the two cases. In contrast, the arguments of the critics are more diverse. The critical arguments for stronger encryption remain highly relevant, especially in the context of the Snowden revelations. The article concludes that we need to adopt a more general cyber security perspective, considering the threat of cyber crime and state hacking, when debating whether the government should be able to weaken encryption.

show abstract

“…Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally-deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law. (Abelson et al 2015) One of the key aims of internet governance should therefore be to strengthen the technology upon which the internet depends. Governments cannot seek to create backdoors to access data if doing so would make the internet less secure.…”

Section: The Cybersecurity Negligence Of Open Societiesmentioning

confidence: 99%