Op-ed: Ray Ozzie’s crypto proposal—a dose of technical reality

INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Enlarge / Encrypting DNS traffic between your device and a "privacy-focused" provider can keep someone from spying on where your browser
is pointed or using DNS attacks to send you somewhere else
(credit: Westend61 / Getty Images) In this op-ed, a group of noted security researchers takes aim at Ray Ozzie's plan to grant law
enforcement access to encrypted devices—and to do so securely
The views here do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica. In the debate over law enforcement access to encrypted devices,
technical details matter
The rhetoric has been stark and, dismayingly often, divorced from technical reality
For example, two years ago we were told that only Apple could write software to open the phone of the San Bernardino terrorist; the
technical reality turned out to be that an FBI contractor was able to do so
More recently, the rhetoric has been about the thousands of phones that are part of criminal investigations and that law enforcement cannot
unlock
Today reality is that Grayshift will sell law enforcement a $15,000 tool that opens 300 locked phones or online access for $30,000 to open
as many phones as law enforcement has warrants for. Into this conflict comes a Wired article suggesting that Ray Ozzie, the inventor of
Lotus Notes and a former VP at Microsoft, has a solution to the exceptional access problem (the ability for law enforcement with a warrant
to open a locked device)
The article is yet another example of the wide gap between wishful rhetoric and technical reality. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments