'Key recovery' would be bad for business

Last week, key recovery - or rather, the Government's laudable opposition to it - was flagged in the press as a worrying issue for law enforcement here. But bizarrely, it is not Irish law enforcement that is raising the issue - it is two Irish security and encryption technology companies, Danu Industries in Dundalk, and to a milder extent, Baltimore Technologies in Dublin. Key recovery is a system whereby law enforcement agencies require users of encryption (document-encoding) software to hand over either the numeric "key" used to encode a document or the so-called plaintext (uncoded) version of the document. In some cases, governments want to require users of encryption to hand over their keys in advance, without being accused of wrongdoing, to a "trusted third party", a theoretically neutral body. In others, they want to compel people to produce keys and/or plaintext upon production of a warrant.

The Government's proposed legislation has already been widely praised by industry and privacy advocates and is considered to be internationally ground-breaking. Yet both Baltimore and Danu were quoted in the press last Sunday as suggesting the proposed legislation would leave the Government (or, presumably, State law enforcement agencies) "impotent" - the word was attributed to Danu.

In an astonishing statement, a Danu security analyst is quoted as stating that legislation needed to be introduced which would "focus on access to the encryption keys to ensure that the underlying data can be interpreted should it be in encrypted form". This stance is usually favoured more by covert intelligence agencies than companies in the business of providing security to businesses (the FBI and MI5 have been fighting for key recovery for years).

Indeed, nearly every technology company, and the leading technologists in the industry, strongly oppose key recovery.

Law enforcement has argued that encryption will be used by terrorists and criminals, which it will, and since encryption allows documents to be encoded with a virtually impenetrable level of security, it poses serious challenges to law enforcement. But for many reasons, key recovery is not the solution.

Let's look at Fallacy Number One: that because businesses may sometimes wish to leave a copy of their encryption keys with a third party - people already forget their PINs, after all - the needs of law enforcement will actually dovetail nicely with the practical needs of businesses.

But this is untrue. As 11 leading cryptographers and security analysts point out in their report, Risks of Key Recovery (www.cdt.org/crypto/risks98) and others argued before the US Senate (www.computerprivacy.org/archive/03231998-1.shtml), the needs of businesses and individuals are intrinsically different to the desires of law enforcement.

Because businesses require an audit trail, most material would already be available in plaintext form and more than one company member would surely keep copies of the keys (as would happen with, say a safe combination).

In the case of encrypted e-mail, who would leave a key with a third party when it is both easier - and free simply to generate a new key? Furthermore, businesses are unlikely to want to increase the risk that an unscrupulous person could gain access to their records, or hack the third party's own files.

So, forget that argument (incidentally, it is an FBI favourite). People aren't likely to use routinely third parties for key storage and are even less likely to agree that law enforcement deserves access to stored keys (indeed, the prospect is quite likely to dampen enthusiasm for using third parties altogether for key storage). More relevant is that the best international experts in the field of cryptography have said they cannot envision any way an adequate key-recovery system could work (see the report noted above). That's because producing a warrant for keys or plaintext will never be a productive approach as suspects can say they have lost the key and can't remember the plaintext document. There's no way to force compliance.

Therefore, law enforcement agencies in the US and Britain have stated they need a global system that links enforcement agencies to a database of keys; that they need to be able to compel encryption users to hold an archive of the plaintext of encrypted documents; and that they need the right to speedy access to keys or plaintext - e.g., covert access. The FBI is currently pushing such a draconian plan.

Such a system introduces not just an unacceptably high trade-off of privacy rights for security concerns, but actually creates a system whereby the same terrorists and criminals are offered new ways to compromise the very security systems that are supposed to protect against them.

The experts agree: any system in which any third party can lawfully acquire access to others' encryption keys allows for a network of vulnerable backdoor entry points.

The crypto experts say an adequate key recovery system would need to span the globe and manage billions of keys. Creating a security network to protect this highly sensitive network of key information would be well nigh impossible and would additionally require implicit trust in all law enforcement agencies around the world. And this all presumes criminals will use a commercially-available encryption program, itself an unlikely scenario in the age of intelligent hackers and free Web-based encryption programs.

And finally, in the US and Britain, civil-rights advocates have raised numerous objections to key-recovery proposals, which, for example, run counter to several US constitutional guarantees.

Despite years of trying, the US and British governments have failed to introduce key-recovery plans. In every instance, they have faced daunting opposition in both the public, private and increasingly, political sectors and the likelihood of court challenges. So why and how in the world could key recovery work here?

Far from leaving the Government "impotent", Irish encryption legislation reflects an understanding of real-world e-commerce and privacy issues and a confidence that privacy and individual security can be balanced with international security needs. In contrast, if key recovery is implemented, every person and company relying on encryption will be rendered impotent.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie