It seems every time there is a terrorist attack, governments around the world use it as an opportunity to chip away at encryption. The latest attack was the UK Home secretary, Amber Rudd, who called WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption "completely unacceptable". She then adds that there should be “no hiding place for terrorists”.
Encryption is publicly known mathematics and there is no way to put the "cat back in the bag". If encryption is banned for law abiding Joe and Jane public, it makes everyone less safe but terrorists will simply use their resources and public encryption libraries to write their own encrypted programs and do their evil work.
Minister Rudd's comments are the clearly from someone that doesn't understand the technology and how it is the fundamental underpinning of our entire technological society. Anytime you perform online banking, file your taxes with the government online or request a government service, you are using an encrypted channel of communication called TLS. It is the technology that makes using sensitive services on the internet possible.
Banning encryption would mean no more online shopping, banking or anything else that requires privacy. So banning would not be accepted by our always online generation.
Government would counter this argument by saying they "simply" want a back door and not a ban on encryption. A backdoor would allow intelligence and police to more easily perform investigations while keeping general encryption alive.
As a security professional, let me be clear that this is simply not possible. The minute a backdoor is implemented, it becomes a vulnerability that threat actors would attempt to find and exploit (organized crime, nation-state actors, foreign rogue governments, etc).If the Snowden and Vault7 leaks have shown us anything, it is that even government has issues keeping secrets. The reason encryption works is that it is based on mathematics and remains perfectly secure even though all the protocols, formula and applications are well know.
Creating a backdoor for the good guys means you are also creating it for the bad guys.
The Vault7 leak showed that governments have already solved the Whatsapp encryption issue by hacking the end device. When hacked, government can see pre/post encryption messages and therefore they are able to get the information they need. Yes it requires more work but every job has its challenges. This would bypass the encryption of Signal, Whatsapp or any other encrypted communicator.
Terrorism is a bad thing that affects as all. It is the worst of humanity being manifested because of hatred and misunderstanding of one another. Politicians are targeting encryption because it is the easy target but it isn't the right one.
As a geeky security professional, I will always be able to protect myself by rolling my own encryption, but the general population won't. Considering everything about us can now easily be stolen from our smartphone, I'm worried about any weakening of encryption. Just think about everything stored on your device (location history, contacts, social networks, where you have been and what you have done, health information, etc) and how you would feel if someone had access to all of it without your knowledge.
We need technically knowledgeable politicians that will fight the good fight (against terrorism) without trying to neuter good wholesome public protecting technologies. It's like saying we will ban pools because there were 3,536 fatal non-boat related drownings in 2015 (there are over 8M pools public and private in the USA). We can't let a small batch of rotten apples contaminate the entire batch of cider.
