Strong encryption essential for future digital economy – ISOC

ITRealms:

The Internet Society (ISOC) has called for strong encryption, describing it as an essential for future digital economy, reports ITRealms.

ISOC in its submission to the Group of 20 (G20) discussions wrap-up in Düsseldorf, Germany on Digital Economy Declaration, outlined a path for a strong digital future.

According to ISOC President and CEO, Kathy Brown, the current level of interconnection will only boost the market, where there is secure and trusted environment.

This, she said, cannot happen without a serious commitment by all parties to security and privacy.

Strong encryption, Brown noted, is an essential piece to the future of the world’s economy and the Internet Society believes it should be the norm for all online transactions.

“It allows us to do our banking, conduct local and global business, run our power grids, operate, communications networks, and do almost everything else,” she said.

ISOC president also said that encryption is a technical building block for securing infrastructure, communications and information; hence, it should be made stronger and universal, not weaker.

She lamented that rather than being recognized as the way to secure online transactions or conversations, all too often the debate focuses on the use of encryption as a way to thwart law enforcement.

“To undermine the positive role of encryption in the name of security could have devastating consequences,” she insisted.

Many great minds, ISOC chief pointed out, have already devoted considerable effort to resolving the conundrum posed by competing public policy objectives: providing security, safety and trust on the one hand, and law enforcement and legitimate policy goals on the other.

“But, it is time to stop kicking the encryption football up and down the field. Instead, we should recognize that encryption is key to the future digital economy and stop treating it as simply an obstacle to law enforcement. We need to deconstruct the issues faced by law enforcement and policy makers and agree together how we can achieve a trusted digital economy underpinned by encryption,” Ms Brown said.

ITRealms reports that this was the first time the G20 countries held a Ministerial on digital matters and also the first time that G20 is inviting non-government stakeholders to contribute to these issues.

Describing it as turning point that should not be missed, ISOC president emphasized that all views, including the technical perspective, must be at the table if the global community is to achieve progress on the G20’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) goals.

“If the G20 countries are serious about strengthening their economies and continuing to deliver economic and social prosperity to their citizens in future, there are three key principles they should endorse and implement immediately,” she outlined.

These, Brown said, include that encryption is an important technical foundation for trust in the digital economy and should be the norm. Stressing that all users whether government, business or individual should use encryption to protect infrastructure, communications and the privacy and integrity of their data.

“Encryption technologies should be strengthened, not weakened,” ISOC president asserted.
Secondly, she said, is the fact that security of the digital economy is a shared responsibility that needs the expertise and experience of all stakeholders, across border and across disciplines.

“It is an urgent need that will require open, inclusive collaboration,” she said. 

Thirdly, the ISOC chief executive said that users’ rights should be at the heart of any decisions related to the digital economy, because both the customers and contributors to the success of the digital economy, has to be involved.

Therefore, she said, Internet Society called for ubiquitous encryption for the Internet.

“We strongly believe that this is the best foundation for trust in the digital economy, and we urge the G20 nations to stand behind encryption,” ISOC maintained.

ITRealms gathered that currently, there are estimated 360 million people that take part in cross-border e-commerce, with some 28 per cent of output in mature economies is digital. The Internet is thus set to contribute $6.6 trillion a year, or 7.1 per cent of the total GDP in the G20 countries.

Chuks Egbune/GEE

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Backdoor encryption controversy persists on WhatsApp

ITRealms:

The suspected ‘backdoor encryption’ saga has continued to trail WhatsApp, a company of Facebook, reports ITRealms.

This is coming as some online security professionals refused to buy into the excuses of Facebook and WhatsApp, that the ‘Backdoor' is really a feature for ensuring messages are not lost in certain situations.

ITRealms recalls that despite WhatsApp denial of having backdoor for decrypting messages, the much WhatsApp’s much touted end-to-end encryption capability has become the subject of considerable scrutiny following a report by The Guardian Friday of a ‘backdoor’ in the messaging service that apparently allows for encrypted messages to be intercepted and read, according to DarkReading.

Also, the Guardian’s report was based on a vulnerability disclosure that Tobias Boelter, a PhD student and computer scientist at the University of California made a few months ago and precisely on April last year.

Boelter claimed that he had found a serious weakness in the manner in which the latest version of WhatsApp handles messages that are sent to a recipient who might have swapped or reset their phone, or might simply have been offline when the message was sent.

In such situations Boleter said, WhatsApp holds the message and retransmits it when the recipient comes back online but using a different encryption key than the one that was originally used to encrypt the message.

This approach gives attackers an opportunity to spoof the recipient’s phone on the WhatsApps server, use their own public key, and intercept messages that were intended for the recipient.

The Guardian described Boelter’s discovery as a security backdoor that governments could use to snoop in on the communications of targeted and unsuspecting WhatsApp users.

WhatsApp’s practice of creating new encryption keys for offline users without the knowledge of the sender and then rebroadcasting the message, effectively allows Facebook to intercept and read the messages of users communicating with each other under the assumption that their messages are impenetrable, the paper warned.

In an updated blog post, Boelter Friday expressed uncertainty over whether the issue he discovered is a bug or a backdoor. “In other words: Is this flaw put deliberately into the WhatsApp messenger to allow them or the government to look at targeted messages?” he wrote. “Or is the flaw introduced through a simple programmer error? Or is it even a useful feature?”

According to Boelter, Facebook showed little interest when he first reported his discovery to them last April, but recently claimed that it was not a bug but a feature for ensuring messages got through as intended to offline users.

In an emailed statement to Dark Reading, a Facebook spokesperson described The Guardian’s claims as patently false. “The design decision referenced in the Guardian story prevents millions of messages from being lost,” the spokesperson said. “In many parts of the world, people frequently change devices and SIM cards. In these situations, we want to make sure people's messages are delivered, not lost in transit.”

In addition, WhatsApp has a security notifications option that people can use if they want to be notified when a contact’s security code or public encryption key has changed, the WhatsApp spokesman said.

Jon Geater, chief technology officer of Thales e-Security said the concerns raised by Boelter are not as serious as they might appear.

“Indeed, there is almost no hack here. One might argue that WhatsApp has elected to provide an insecure default configuration,” Geater said in a statement. “Users who care about the authorities intercepting their messages are quite likely to turn on security notifications, and then the problem is almost entirely diminished,” he said.

Dissidents and those using WhatsApp in repressive countries might need to take additional precautions like using an out of band method to ensure that a user has really changed devices, he said.

Chris Perry, COO of Secured Communications says the most troubling aspect about the whole controversy is the lack of full disclosure by Facebook WhatsApp.

“When a company builds into its system a failsafe, such as this feature, there should be full disclosure to their customer base that it exists and how and why it would be activated,” Perry says in comments to Dark Reading.

As it is, only the sender is informed of the encryption key change and that too only if the sender has opted-in to the notification warning, he says. “There should be a warning notification for both sender and recipient that is default activated advising when they are no longer in a secure encrypted environment.”

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