Summary
The UK Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), claiming it will enhance online safety but actually leading to increased censorship and surveillance. The bill grants the government the authority to compel tech companies to scan all user data, including encrypted messages, to detect child abuse content, effectively creating a backdoor. This jeopardizes privacy and security for everyone. The bill also mandates the removal of content deemed inappropriate for children, potentially resulting in politicized censorship decisions. Age-verification systems may infringe on anonymity and free speech. The implications of how these powers will be used are a cause for concern, with the possibility that encrypted services may withdraw from the UK if their users’ security is compromised.
The current state of the legislation is this: the gvmt started out by saying “you must do this”, then when it finally sunk in that it wasn’t technically possible right now, they then said “OK, we get its not possible right now. As soon as it is, you must do this.”
Some people have said ‘no problem, its never going to be possible to break encryption’. This is not accurate. When quantum processing becomes a reality, which is realistically not too far away now, encryption will be trivial to crack. That’s the point the rest of the world need to worry because you’re right, every other gvmt in the world will follow the UK’s lead.
we have plenty of solutions to this though… we have quantum-safe encryption
afaik how these work is that currently cracking encryption is CPU-bound (takes a lot of CPU resources to find the key) which quantum can do much faster… there are classes of encryption that are RAM-bound though, which mean that quantum still can’t crack them because it doesn’t give us huge amounts of storage
On the tangent of quantum factorization, I feel like a reality of modern encryption at risk is still very slim. At least if the wiki article is anything to go by. I think we are sooner to have backdoors in encryption algorithms than we are quantum messing everything up.
IBM think otherwise
NIST already has recommendations for quantum resistant algorithms. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms
This is very good news, I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.
Most applications, like your internet traffic, aren’t using public key encryption.
Doesn’t an https website use a public key?
Signal is already making some progress on building protections against the use of quantum computers to break its encryption https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/
No sale. Most encryption algorithms in use today are already quantum resistant and there are a bunch of stronger ones waiting in the wings. Basically a solved problem. Stuff the NSA already harvested years ago, not so much.