Encryption

Encryption  (technology)
Interest of	• Laura Halminen • Bruce Schneier
A process of obscuring information so that it can only be read by a selected number of recipients.

Encryption is the process of changing data from an understandable form into a scrambled form. The inverse process, of restoring the original data from the encrypted forms referred to as decryption (or deciphering).

Official narrative

The commercially-controlled media regularly have stories suggesting that a battle is ongoing between intelligence agencies and the technology companies, about the use of encryption, with the former seeking the ability to decrypt any message, and the latter attempting to protect their users' data from being read. This may well be mere smoke and mirrors to obscure the reality that a large proportion of all large companies' encryption products are cracked, whether by design or by faulty programming.

Theory

Encryption has 3 to 6 parts: "M" a Message; "K" a Key to encrypt a message, and "C" the result resulting Ciphertext or Ciphered data. Part 4,5, and 6 may be additional keys that interact with other keys. These may be public keys and private keys, as used in either an RSA method or DH-ElGamal method. Other systems of key exchange, sharing keys in a secure manner, exist.

Keys

By analogy with doors, a "key" is needed to provide access to encrypted data. A "hardcoded" key is one that cannot be changed, e.g. with a software update. This can lead to a security breach if software creators lose control of their keys. Manufacturers continue to produce hardware wit this vulnerability.

History

Digital Encryption dates to 1919 at AT&T Federal Labs in the financial district of New York City. A pioneer in this work was Gilbert Vernam.

Classic systems involved pencil and paper methods

One group of systems used letter tables and rules to change a text letter into a ciphered letter. Another method used a known rule to convert letters to numbers, and then performing an addition function with a key, to produce a ciphered text. Yet another example of an encryption method was to use a dictionary as a codebook, assigning words to the combination of page number, column, and entry of that column. See codebook; dictionary code. An illustrated example is generally known as the One Time Key method; versions being the One-Time Pad, One-time tape . In the 70s and 80's, small cryptologic communications terminals such as the XMP-500 and XMP-800 from Datotek. ( See brochure page ) https://wikispooks.com/w/images/4/4b/Datotek-prod.pdf For U.S. Government agents, the TRW KL-43F, https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:KL-43C-pic.jpg KL-43C, and KL-43A was used on occasion.

Legal status

The deep state appears to be trying to use the "war on terror" as an excuse to outlaw encryption by associating it with "terrorism". This topic is regularly revisited and stepwise after acts of "terrorism". It is proceeding at different rates in different countries.

Australia

Under the 2015 Defence Trade Controls Act, which came into force in 2016, it may be illegal to learn about encryption in Australia.

Europe

In August 2016, Germany's Thomas de Maizière and France's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve called for the European Commission to change the law to afford security agencies the ability to access encrypted data.

Germany

In 2017 Thomas de Maizière, Germany's Interior Minister was lobbying to make encryption illegal unless authorities were provided with a backdoor - citing the difficulty law enforcement agents have had in past months investigating "terrorist" attacks and other crimes.

USA

"By the late 1970s, individuals within the U.S. government were already discussing how to solve the “problem” of the growing individual and commercial use of strong encryption."

Until 1996, cryptographic software was classified as munitions in the US, with strict limits to try to prevent effective strong encryption from being exported. If they sold encryption abroad, US software companies often exported versions with shorter keys that would succumb to brute force search. The US government faught a losing battle with commercial groups to try to monopolize use of strong encryption. In September 1999, the White House announced "a sweeping policy change that removed virtually all restrictions on the export of retail encryption products, regardless of key length. As journalist Steven Levy put it succinctly: “It was official: public crypto was our friend.”"

In April 2016, a draft of a law called the Compliance with Court Orders Act were leaked, which suggested broad plans to make encryption illegal. The Business Software Alliance came out against the Burr-Feinstein bill, saying it "strongly urges" the US Congress to think again.

Total ban

Most modern websites use the https protocol, which makes an encrypted connection. Without such a possibility, many activities, such as for internet banking would be ill advised. There, a total ban on encryption has serious consequences for interent commerce. Nevertheless, some countries, such as Turkmenistan have attempted it.

Current concerns

The good professionals know, that encryption must be in the hands of end-users; including "operators" and "actors" in the intelligence definition. Many people believe that no sovereign government, police agency, criminal or terrorist group needs to know their plans immediately; and that when proper encryption is employed, clear data may be discovered only after 2 weeks to 10 years of continuous cryptanalytic processing. Some^[Who?] suggest key sizes of 48 characters ( 384 bits) to 64 characters ( 512 bits) for a single message.

Vocabulary

CODING has several meanings: 1) To program, "to code"; 2) To convert and change data from one form into another. See also codebook . regarding CODE BOOKs. In the context of what is known as secure voice analog speech is changed, converted into a digital stream or digital buffer ie: "Code Excited Linear Predictive coding, CELP" . This plain voice, is then encrypted by boolean operations; see XOR. Secure voice systems like the STU-III, STE, vIPer and Hannibal are quite complex.

 

An example

Page name	Description
TrueCrypt	Widely praised disk encryption software, abruptly discontinued in 2015. Version 7.1a (not 7.2) is the latest fully functional version.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Roger Dingledine	“The United States government can’t simply run an anonymity system for everybody and then use it themselves only. Because then every time a connection came from it people would say, “Oh, it’s another CIA agent.” If those are the only people using the network.””	Roger Dingledine	2004
Rod Rosenstein	“Responsible encryption is achievable. Responsible encryption can involve effective, secure encryption that allows access only with judicial authorization. Such encryption already exists.”	Rod Rosenstein	10 October 2017
Malcolm Turnbull	“The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”	Malcolm Turnbull	14 July 2017
Christopher Wray	<nowiki>“To put it mildly, this [[[encryption]]] is a huge, huge problem. It impacts investigations across the board — narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation.”</nowiki>	Christopher Wray	2017

 

An official example

Name
Signal Messenger

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.

Tools

TrueCrypt; OpenPGP (GnuPG project); Tor and Tails, Luks and Encryption Wizard, among others.

References

• http://www.jproc.ca/crypto/otfp_otlp.html
• CLARK, Robert M; Intelligence Collection; (c)2014 CQ Press; pp56--58.