Security News > 2020 > November > UK infoseccer launches petition asking government not to backdoor encryption

A UK infosec bod has launched a petition asking the government if it would please drop its plans to install backdoors in end-to-end encryption.

Application security specialist Sean Wright's Parliamentary petition comes as an expression of uneasiness at long-signalled plans for British state agencies to sidestep encryption and enable snooping on private citizens' online conversations at will.

Jake Moore, formerly of Devon Police and now with Slovakian infosec biz ESET, opined to The Register: "Old fashioned police tactics cannot decrypt these encrypted messages easily, which puts many cases on hold. However, putting the internet in jeopardy by demanding the relaxation of encryption is not the answer, so a petition is regretfully needed. Getting the numbers up is another quest altogether and until people fully understand what the government are after, we may sadly struggle to get the signatures up."

The French police hack of encrypted chat service Encrochat, something gleefully leapt upon by British law enforcement, seems to have been made possible not because encryption had to be broken but because the French man-in-the-middle'd an Encrochat server.

From there police deployed malicious updates across the Encrochat network to dump unencrypted images of users' handsets back to servers they controlled, bypassing encryption altogether by simply reading off chats direct from user endpoints.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/11/27/encryption_backdoor_petition/