Week 10 - Mandatory Encryption Backdoors Would Be Ineffective: Study

Cryptography expert Bruce Schneier and researchers Kathleen Seidel and Saranya Vijayakumar conducted a study to determine if the mandating of backdoor encryption on products to investigate crimes and fight terrorism would be as efficient as authorities believe.

The researchers identified 865 hardware and software encryption products from 55 different countries, including 546 from outside the United States. Of the non-US products, 47 are for encrypting files, 68 for email, 104 for messages, 35 for voice, and 61 for private networking.

The study found that while both domestic and foreign encryption products use strong algorithms, including proprietary ones, some solutions have been described as “jurisdictionally agile,” and the organizations behind them can easily move to countries with more favorable legislation.  The study concluded that the international nature of the encryption marketplace would make mandatory backdoors ineffective.

The researchers stated that it would be easy to catch the criminals who are too stupid to realize that their product has been backdoored or lazy to switch to an alternative, but that's not the case for terrorists and organized crime, where they could easily switch to non-US non-backdoored communication devices.

While authorities in the United States and United Kingdom believe encryption backdoors would be beneficial for law enforcement investigations and national security, experts argue that it could also be exploited by criminals and terrorists.

The study conducted is just another reason why weakening encryption isn't the best solution.  Terrorists and smart criminals always find a way around everything and in this case it's just as easy as switching to a non-backdoored device.  I don't think this is the right solution and somehow the US Government and tech giants will have to come up with something that would satisfy both sides.  Weakening encryption on devices is not it.

Reference:
http://www.securityweek.com/mandatory-encryption-backdoors-would-be-ineffective-study