The UK’s war on encryption is dangerous

Stay notified with free updates

Simply sign up Cyber ​​protection MEFT Digest – Directly delivered to your inbox.

Author Encrypted Messaging Service Signal President

Imagine that a government is asking for a car company to secretly weaken the effectiveness of all cars that sell a car company, recklessly endanger the protection of millions of people. It would be an unprecedented degraded to public protection.

Sadly, this is happening in the UK in Cyber ​​Secure, where Apple was forced to take away important privacy and protection protection from the end to the end to the end-to-end encryption-man and infrastructure open for significant weakness.

Apple is not a villain here. It was not the choice of lightly made. The company has invested billions of dollars in cryptographic research and development and marketed itself as a privacy-friendly organization.

However after Apple received the UK government order it was rewritten and weakened in a corner after weakening Principal privacy technologyInteresting engineering weaknesses are not just in the UK, but worldwide, to give the government “rear door” access to cloud storage data encrypted to customers.

The government instructed someone to maintain the order using the so -called “Snoppers’ certificate and use the protection of protection, privacy.

Instead of complying, Apple snatched the encryption from the UK backups alone and turned on a Legal complaintThe It reduces the damage, but it is still harmful. If you are in the UK, your iCloud backups – sensitive business documents, intimate photos, proofs and financial records are full – now it may or may not be apple that is risky for hack, violation, theft and hostility government.

For people outside the UK, the news is still bad. Communication does not remain within the jurisdiction. Anything that you have shared with the UK’s friends or colleagues now lacks the end of encryption from the end to the end. The picture you sent a friend, or confidential information you shared with a replica, it is now weak.

If Apple can be subject to it, we should also break and tremble, as we consider any technology agencies have received this national secret order and can be silently obeyed instead of fighting. Especially the business leaders should be concerned about the confidence they had on the cloud server, software and other critical systems that they could be secretly disgusting in the cloud server, software and other critical systems.

The UK is part of a dangerous tendency and the parcel that threatens the cyber protection of our global infrastructure. Sweden MLAs recently suggested a law that would force communications suppliers to make the door weakness. France is ready to make the same mistake when voting in “Ghost participants” in a secure conversation through the back door. The “Chat Control” law hunts Brussels.

Original infrastructure such as air traffic control, medical devices and emergency activities depends on hardware and software. Using strong encryption to protect protection and privacy is a matter of national protection.

The threat is not estimated. Last year, the US government has released salt typhoon attacks on the US telecommunications system, where the country-state hackers associated with China received access to call records, text messages and more in intimate information of several million Americans. Possible victims were included in President Donald Trump. How did hackers do it? They use the integrated “back door” on the telecommunications system.

The basic topic is simple: encryption is Mathematics and Mathematics does not discriminate between any government investigator and criminal hacker – a rear door is the back door and anyone can enter if it is.

There is also a conflict in the game. If politicians dream of building the UK as a technology center, they should not work to reduce the foundations of cyber protection, on which a functioning technology industry depends.

The government should withdraw its stray orders. Instead of cutting the brake cables in a technical vehicle, it should work to strengthen the protection and privacy of technology that form the nervous system of our world. Business leaders must also take a role, it made it clear that these dangerous steps are unacceptable and the companies they are interested in deploying encryptions from technology licenses and deploying other protection, will be weakened and their customers who will be weak.

We have given a lot of key operations in our life and organization technology, we must recognize that strong encryption is not the enemy of protection – it Is Protection. Weakening of encryption will make any one of us safe as it is as dangerous as it is dangerous.