PWL #47: Keys Under Doormats

PWL Mini:

Maybe you! (10-15 minutes to talk about a paper YOU love)

The Main Event:

The paper that caught my attention is is Keys Under Doormats a paper published in November of 2015 that was co-authored by Susan Landau, Peter G. Neumann, Whitfield Diffie, et. al.

This paper is the most recent of a series of scholarly papers which discusses the risks to the general public that are created when the U.S. Government requests or issues mandates for technology changes to provide "greater security".

These papers published going back to at least 1994 discuss the trade offs between the desired result, the privacy of individuals and the overall reliability of the targeted technology (such as cell phones, internet traffic, etc.) I found the cycle of mandates and responses to be quite complex and compelling. There are many actions and consequences that are non-obvious at first glance and these papers do a good job of explaining these relationships.

Other papers that enter into this dicussion are:

National Security on the Line, May 2006
The Real National-Security Needs for VoIP, November 2005
Codes, Keys and Conflicts: Issues in U.S. Crypto Policy, June 1994