> WASHINGTON—When Attorney General William
Barr returned to the Justice Department
last year, law-enforcement officials
briefed him on how encryption and other
digital-security measures were hindering
investigations into everything from child
sex abuse to terrorism.
> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled,
according to people familiar with the
meeting. The government was struggling
with similar problems when he first served
as attorney general nearly 30 years ago,
he told advisers. Why had they not been
solved?
So, Barr wanted to know why "not been
solved"?
It's simple, really just dirt simple: All
the king's horses and all the king's men
mostly can't hope to factor an integer of
a few thousand digits into a product of
prime numbers. For some more, there are
some good means of generating prime
numbers of at least hundreds of digits
that can be multiplied to give numbers of
thousands of digits with prime factors of
hundreds of digits.
Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's
possible to construct public key
infrastructures. The math and
corresponding source code became readily
available.
So, now anyone can construct relatively
solid means of communicating digital
information that only intended persons can
decrypt and read.
This has been the situation since Rivest,
Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),
Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography,
Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms,
and Source Code in C, ISBN 0-471-11709-9,
John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996.
etc.
In particular, some gang can have their
own software that they wrote themselves
and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc.
So, as in Schneier's book, that has been
the situation back to before 1996.
LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff
and much more since 1996 quite well!
So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at
least since 1996?
I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has
been given a clear, solid, fully
authoritative briefing by some world class
experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So, maybe
this WSJ article was exaggerating?
Here is a point about the past: Just for
relaxation, say, when some code that
should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some
old movies. Some of these are cinema
noir of crime dramas. In general it's
interesting to use those old movies to get
insight into what US pop culture was
like, and how different it was from the
present, those several decades ago.
In particular it gets really surprising
how in those movies the police struggled
terribly when current technology -- DNA
matching, cameras, facial recognition, and
much more -- would have made their work
much easier!
So, if Apple wants to use unbreakable
encryption to sell smartphones, around the
world, the police might have to return to
some of the techniques in those old
movies!
> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved?
So, Barr wanted to know why "not been solved"?
It's simple, really just dirt simple: All the king's horses and all the king's men mostly can't hope to factor an integer of a few thousand digits into a product of prime numbers. For some more, there are some good means of generating prime numbers of at least hundreds of digits that can be multiplied to give numbers of thousands of digits with prime factors of hundreds of digits.
Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's possible to construct public key infrastructures. The math and corresponding source code became readily available.
So, now anyone can construct relatively solid means of communicating digital information that only intended persons can decrypt and read.
This has been the situation since Rivest, Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),
Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996.
etc.
In particular, some gang can have their own software that they wrote themselves and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc.
So, as in Schneier's book, that has been the situation back to before 1996.
LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff and much more since 1996 quite well!
So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at least since 1996?
I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has been given a clear, solid, fully authoritative briefing by some world class experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So, maybe this WSJ article was exaggerating?
Here is a point about the past: Just for relaxation, say, when some code that should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some old movies. Some of these are cinema noir of crime dramas. In general it's interesting to use those old movies to get insight into what US pop culture was like, and how different it was from the present, those several decades ago.
In particular it gets really surprising how in those movies the police struggled terribly when current technology -- DNA matching, cameras, facial recognition, and much more -- would have made their work much easier!
So, if Apple wants to use unbreakable encryption to sell smartphones, around the world, the police might have to return to some of the techniques in those old movies!