Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications

Tags: 2010s Backdoors Keys

Authors: Abelson, Harold and Anderson, Ross and Bellovin, Steven M and Benaloh, Josh and Blaze, Matt and Diffie, Whitfield and Gilmore, John and Green, Matthew and Landau, Susan and Neumann, Peter G and Rivest, Ronald L and Schiller, Jeffrey I and Schneier, Bruce and Specter, Michael and Weitzner, Daniel J

Published: July 2015

URL: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-026.pdf

Abstract: On July 7, 2015, a group of computer scientists and security experts published a study to ascertain the likely effects of renewed attempts to mandate back doors of all data for law enforcement. Twenty years ago the same debate occurred and was abandoned. In the interim, “law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data.” The group “found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago.” The group also found that “any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution”, that “new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws”, and that “the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.”