I was purposing each phone be loaded with a unique “export key” while being built. For about 1 dollar of GPU time, you can force an attacker to take a month of continuous hashing, on similarly performing hardware. (Okay, people with fancy ASICS could get that down to a week... but that still seems like a big win.)
I agree that it would be a consistent political battle — but it’s already that, and it’s clear people with power are getting fed up with technologists attempting to impose their ideology without compromising with other social needs.
That’s what prompts laws about wiretapping or mandated backdoors.
I haven’t heard the same arguments about safes I do about encryption — and the reason is because there’s an understood bypass, if they gain access, have time and money.
By compromising and allowing targeted cracking, we split the faction pushing for backdoored phones, solve most of the issues, and give ourselves a viable path to accomplish something rather than being forced into backing down or completely compromising systems. Further, by being willing to compromise, we gain a voice on shaping how that discussion looks — rather than largely being excluded.
More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19040252
I agree that it would be a consistent political battle — but it’s already that, and it’s clear people with power are getting fed up with technologists attempting to impose their ideology without compromising with other social needs.
That’s what prompts laws about wiretapping or mandated backdoors.
I haven’t heard the same arguments about safes I do about encryption — and the reason is because there’s an understood bypass, if they gain access, have time and money.
By compromising and allowing targeted cracking, we split the faction pushing for backdoored phones, solve most of the issues, and give ourselves a viable path to accomplish something rather than being forced into backing down or completely compromising systems. Further, by being willing to compromise, we gain a voice on shaping how that discussion looks — rather than largely being excluded.