The underlying issue here is not limited to government encryption backdoors. If either side of an encrypted conversation is intercepted, the same problem occurs. The Ukrainian military, for example, is now fighting an aggressive phishing campaign that plants malware, oftentimes a keylogger, that bypasses the encryption even more effectively than would a backdoor.
Endpoint interception has also turned around and bitten the cyber crooks themselves. Europol officials in December stumbled on a cyberthief that cleverly used an app that made messages disappear a few minutes after being read. But, given that experienced thieves know enough to not trust other thieves, one of the recipients screen-captured a discussion about money-sharing with his colleagues. That act made all of his encrypted messages readable for law enforcement.
Many issues with backdoors, say analysts
Analysts are concerned about the growing demands for backdoors. Aisling Dawson, digital security industry analyst at ABI Research, saw Whittaker’s post and said that many government encryption proposals “fail to display an understanding of the technical implications of such a backdoor” and that these governments “face the prospect of increasing numbers of organizations exiting their marketspace, triggering economic losses and reducing the number of security vendors within the ecosystem, or creating the potential for legal and judicial challenges to proposed regulatory action.”
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
