Keys Under The Mat: NOBUS, Key Escrow, or a Crumple Zone?

Breaking Cryto

Earlier this week, senior administration officials met to debate the usage of end-to-end of encryption. But there’s great tension in the debate, as a mandated back-door could open the Internet up to large scale threats. On one side we have the Department of Justice and the FBI — who want a backdoor — and on the other we have the Commerce and State Departments — who define the risks involved for secrets at every level.

This is part of one of the great debates of the 21st Century on whether we need strong cryptography, or methods which can be by law enforcement. In previous proposals, the only acceptable methods which would allow law enforcement to crack crypto is to implement:

• A NOBUS (‘nobody but us’) backdoor, which will be mathematically possible for government agents to crack the encryption but no-one else.
• Key escrow. This is where a copy of the encryption key is kept in escrow so that it can be used by a government agent.
• Crumble zones. While many governments and law enforcement agencies have called for backdoors in encryption, researchers at Boston University recently defined a backdoor method that would allow governments to decrypt secret communications. It uses a crumple zone method and where it is extremely…