Opinion With Apple pulling the plug on at-rest end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for
UK users, and Signal threatening to pull out of Sweden if that government
demands E2EE backdoors, it's looking bleak.

There's no answer to the objection that you can't protect deliberate flaws in
encryption from themselves being abused. The strength of E2EE is the underlying
mathematical proof that can no more be overturned by law than pi can be made
exactly 3. The implementation has to be deliberately crippled.

This has its own practical problems. Most obviously, if you are a criminal
relying on encryption to hide your misdeeds, you will choose to use a
non-crippled option. The UK government thought about this and made the whole
process of demanding access "secret," which would work only if everyone
involved, including those outside UK jurisdiction, felt honor-bound not to leak
it. Even then, secrecy wouldn't last if features mysteriously changed in the
software. Assuming nobody noticed, then the first court case that relied on
evidence from a supposedly secure source would fall apart on examination. It
turns out that if you can't back secrecy with solid math, it won't stay secret.

Conversely, if you know what you're doing, then you can evade snoopery. You can
simply use software that doesn't rely on the compromised services, you can run
encryption software locally before uploading to the cloud, or you can arrange
your own private services that don't have a corporate entity attached who can be
forced to capitulate. If you control the software that implements the math and
the data flow on your system, you're golden. Criminals know this, tech types
know this, it's just the vast majority of innocent users who don't. They're the
most at risk of abuse from snoops, and a fix that works for them will do the
most good for the most people.

Of course, the best way to control software you trust is to use open source. You
can't hide a back door in open source because it would be immediately visible
and removable, as well as being forensic evidence for who'd been doing the
tampering. That's the theory, anyway, although there are a variety of reasons it
could happen.

Proton Mail is a good proof of concept. Email sent between two Proton Mail users
is always end-to-end encrypted, with only encrypted versions stored by Proton's
servers. Message composition and consumption happens within the users' browsers,
using code sent by Proton Mail for client-side execution. This code is
completely open and examinable by users. More to the point, it is amenable to
automated non-Proton change logging. Once a known-good version is established in
the community, any changes can be instantly flagged for attention. Crypto
backdoors aren't subtle when introduced to well-documented, known-good code. The
entire point of modern encryption is that, except for the keys, there are no
secrets and nowhere to hide ΓÇô provided you can look.

    The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won't
    Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE
    UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we
won't go into the cloud
    Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

What Proton Mail does in-browser ΓÇô client-side encryption code distributed as
source ΓÇô can be extended to whatever functions are needed to provide E2EE
flows within any OS. It's been decades since we had enough local resources to
make on-the-fly compilation with caching work effective in even the meanest
devices. Open source has proved that trusted distribution systems can be built
from multiple independent entities, leaving no single point of attack where
criminals or law enforcement can operate against users' interests ΓÇô at least
undetected. As for seamless integration of FOSS components on proprietary
systems, everything except Windows is built on a mix of FOSS and closed
commercial components. Windows' core may be proprietary, but ask nicely and
there's Linux.

FOSS is the ideal model for an open, attack-resilient, self-monitoring E2EE
framework that absolves commercial entities from being entities that malicious
governments can pry open. A completely open system cannot be secretly
compromised, and if any component is compromised, it can be isolated and
replaced fast. Unless all countries outlaw developing and publishing source code
implementations of standard mathematical algorithms, the idea is unassailable
ΓÇô if the industry decides it wants it. It's not as if it would displace any
significant proprietary secrets: all this stuff is known, and there's plenty of
room elsewhere to create differential advantages for any particular platform.

States and their security services have spent decades trying to secure
encryption for "good" people while breaking it for "bad" ones. You cannot do
that, no matter how devoutly you say Something Must Be Done. If the industry,
especially the open source community, can remove the temptation once and for
all, then the stuff that does work ΓÇô intelligence, policing, infiltration ΓÇô
will get the attention it needs. ®

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/03/opinio...

... TCOB1: https://binkd.rima.ie telnet: binkd.rima.ie
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20240309
 * Origin:  <-Sean's Pointless Point->  (618:500/1.1)