UK Online Safety Bill And Encryption

 Will the UK block the WP.  

Wikipedia will not perform Online Safety Bill age checks

Published in the BBC

By Chris Vallance & Tom GerkenTechnology reporters

Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says.   Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors".

A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result.

But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification.

Wikipedia has millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world.

It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb.

The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024.

Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.

Lucy Crompton-Reid, chief executive of Wikimedia UK, an independent charity affiliated with the foundation, warns some material on the site could trigger age verification.

"For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography," she said.

But Ms MacKinnon wrote: "The Wikimedia Foundation will not be verifying the age of UK readers or contributors."

WhatsApp: Rather be blocked in UK than weaken security

Online Safety Bill changes 'not ruled out' - culture secretary

As well as requiring Wikipedia to gather data about its users, checking ages would also require a "drastic overhaul" to technical systems.

If a service does not comply with the bill, there can be serious consequences potentially including large fines, criminal sanctions for senior staff, or restricting access to a service in the UK.

Wikimedia UK fears that site could be blocked because of the Bill, and the risk that it will mandate age checks. ... '

Breaking RSA with a Quantum Computer

Article at below link has been considerably updated and commented on ,,, 

Breaking RS A with a Quantum Computer  January 3, 2023,   by Bruce Schneier

A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper   claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong.

We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy. But it takes a big quantum computer, on the orders of millions of qbits, to factor anything resembling the key sizes we use today. What the researchers have done is combine classical lattice reduction factoring techniques with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm. This means that they only need a quantum computer with 372 qbits, which is well within what’s possible today. (The IBM Osprey is a 433-qbit quantum computer, for example. Others are on their way as well.)

The Chinese group didn’t have that large a quantum computer to work with. They were able to factor 48-bit numbers using a 10-qbit quantum computer. And while there are always potential problems when scaling something like this up by a factor of 50, there are no obvious barriers.    ( this Schneier Article is now considerably updated and usefully commented on ) .....

Encryption Contender Cracked by Simpler Methods

 Good to see this was detected early.  Without Quantum Methods.  Why was it so susceptible? Implications for future methods?   (This was later explained to some degree, with further comments in Schneier:   https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/sike-broken.html#comments) 

(updated) 

Post-Quantum Encryption Contender Taken Out by Single-Core PC in One Hour

By Ars Technica, August 3, 2022

Researchers at Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) ruled out an algorithm selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as a potential post-quantum encryption program.

The Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) algorithm was thought to be quantum-decryption-proof by avoiding key encapsulation's vulnerabilities through a supersingular isogeny graph.

KU Leuven researchers used a single classical computer to break SIKE, which took it just one hour.

The team showed SIKE's linchpin, the Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) protocol, is vulnerable to a variant of a GPST adaptive attack that "exploits the fact that SIDH has auxiliary points and that the degree of the secret isogeny is known," explained Steven Galbraith at New Zealand's University of Auckland....  ' 

According to the University of Maryland's Jonathan Katz, “The attack is entirely classical, and does not require quantum computers at all.” ...   '  

Full Article

See explanation, comments in Schneier:  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/sike-broken.html#comments )

Tiny, Cheap Solution for Quantum-Secure Encryption

Advances for Quantum Encryption

Tiny, Cheap Solution for Quantum-Secure Encryption

By Washington State University McKelvey School of Engineering,  March 29, 2022

Researchers at Washington State University in St. Louis have proposed a quantum-secure system that is inexpensive, convenient, and scalable.

The new protocol for Symmetric Key Distribution (SPoTKD) uses tiny microchips embedded with even smaller clocks formed from electrons, which migrate between two locations via quantum tunneling.

The chips' initial state is recorded on a computer server, and creating a secure channel involves noting the time on a subset of the clocks and transmitting that data to the server, which can apply its knowledge of the initial state to determine what time the clocks read at the time they were sent.

Measuring the electrons induces the clock's collapse, thwarting surveillance or information hacking.

Quantum tunneling also allows SPoTKD to power itself for extended periods with the slightest input at the beginning.

From Washington State University McKelvey School of Engineering

View Full Article        

Post Quantum Encryption Cracking

 If so, a  problem for one kind of approach. 

Encryption Meant to Protect Against Quantum Hackers Is Easily Cracked

By New Scientist, March 11, 2022, Comments

Ward Beullens at IBM Research Zurich in Switzerland easily cracked a cryptography algorithm touted as one of three contenders for a global standard against quantum hacking.

Rainbow is a signature algorithm submitted to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s Post-Quantum Cryptography competition, and Beullens extracted Rainbow's secret key from a public key in just 53 hours on a standard laptop.He said this flaw would enable attackers to wrongfully "prove" they are someone else, rendering Rainbow "useless" for message verification.

NIST's Dustin Moody said the Rainbow hack had been confirmed, and the algorithm will not likely be selected as the final signature algorithm.

From New Scientist

Homomorphic Data Issues

Less than total security?   

Researchers Can Steal Data During Homomorphic Encryption

By NC State University News, March 4, 2022

Researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) and Turkey's Dokuz Eylul University have cracked next-generation homomorphic encryption via side-channel attacks.

Homomorphic encryption renders data unreadable to third parties, while still permitting third parties and third-party technologies to perform operations using the data.

NC State's Aydin Aysu said the process consumes much computing power, and the researchers were able to read data during encryption by monitoring power consumption in the data encoder using Microsoft's SEAL Homomorphic Encryption Library.

"We were able to do this with a single power measurement," Aysu noted, and the team confirmed the flaw in the library up through least version 3.6.  .... ' 

“What we’ve found is that there is a way to ‘crack’ homomorphic encryption that is done using that library via a side-channel attack,” said NC State's Aydin Aysu. “We were able to do this with a single power measurement  ... 

From NC State University News

View Full Article

Generating Good Random Numbers for Encryption

 Ultimately having good unpredictable randomness is essential for encoding and thus security.

Overloaded Memory Chips Generate Truly Random Numbers for Encryption  By New Scientist, January 13, 2022

Generating truly random numbers for cryptographic algorithms could become possible through Nisa Bostanci and colleagues at Turkey's TOBB University of Economics and Technology.

The researchers' system reduces interference between chip memory used to produce random numbers and memory used to run normal computer operations.

The system forecasts when memory will be used, and compiles an inventory of random numbers then.Once the stockpile is depleted, it requests and prioritizes new random numbers in a line with other software tasks.  In 186 experiments, the system improved normal computer operational performance by 17.9% and random number generation by 25.1%, versus previous dynamic random-access memory random number-generating models.

From New Scientist

View Full Article        

On Quantum Related Risk

 Good overview of the risks to be considered regarding.

Quantum Computing Is for Tomorrow, But Quantum-Related Risk Is Here Today   

By Kevin Townsend on January 03, 2022  in Security Week

Booz Allen Hamilton has analyzed the quantum computing arms race to determine China’s current and future capabilities, and to understand the likely use of China’s cyber capabilities within that race. It concludes, “Risk management must start now.”

The report is really in two halves. The first describes the cybersecurity threat inherent in the quantum arms race, while the second is a primer on the complexities of quantum computing. While this is worth reading, only the cybersecurity threats are relevant to us here.

The two cybersecurity threats

Theft of quantum-relevant research

The background is China’s avowed intention to lead the world in technology and economy. The former is key to the latter; and being first to achieve quantum computing will be a major fillip. For now, China is behind the U.S. and Europe in quantum research but claims it will achieve at least parity by the mid-2020s.

Booz Allen is not convinced this will happen, but believes that China may be the first to achieve limited use cases in quantum computing. The first practical benefits from quantum are likely to come from quantum simulators rather than general purpose quantum computing. These are sometimes called ‘noisy intermediate scale quantum’ (NISQ) computers, so named by John Preskill, a quantum physics researcher at Caltech. 

They will be able to outperform classical computers in areas that include quantum properties – such as drug research. Booz Allen sees this area as providing the earliest quantum computing benefit. In the shorter term, the best quantum simulators will provide the greatest economic benefit.

This is not a cybersecurity threat. But western research in this area will be a primary target for Chinese threat groups seeking to ensure that Chinese capabilities remain at the forefront.

Quantum decryption

The most direct cybersecurity threat will come from quantum-assisted asymmetric decryption – that is, the ability to crack the public key encryption ubiquitous in communications. A quantum asymmetric decryption algorithm was developed by mathematician Peter Shor as long ago as 1994. Although still largely theoretical, it is believed that this algorithm will crack asymmetric encryption at usable speeds as soon as a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is developed. The report suggests this could be achieved as early as 2027, but is more likely to be impossible before 2030

Booz Allen alludes to this threat in three of its five ‘anticipated quantum computing threats from China’: theft of encrypted data with an expectation of future quantum-assisted decryption; adversarial development of quantum-assisted decryption sooner than quantum-resistant encryption can be deployed; and unobservable adversarial development of quantum-assisted decryption. .... ' 

600 KM Quantum Encryption Transmission

Recently studied a company doing something similar, over considerably less distance.  Will this continue to expand?   Implications? 

Quantum-Encrypted Information Transmitted Over Fiber More Than 600 Km Long   By Optica  October 25, 2021  in CACM

Researchers at the University of Leeds and Toshiba Europe in the U.K. established secure quantum communication over 605 kilometers (375 miles) of fiber through a new signal stabilization method.

The researchers used the twin-field quantum key distribution protocol, which enables two geographically separated users to establish a common secret bit-string by sharing photons, which are usually transmitted over an optical fiber.

The stabilization technique utilizes two optical reference signals at different wavelengths to minimize phase fluctuations over long distances.

The researchers demonstrated that this method could support repeater-like performance while accommodating losses outside the traditional limit of 100 decibels over a 605-kilometer-long quantum channel.

Toshiba Europe's Andrew Shields said, "This will allow us to build national- and continental-scale fiber networks connecting major metropolitan areas."

From Optica    View Full Article  

Amazon Encrypts Doorbells

 Long Awaited, we are just a bit more secure,  deserves it.

Amazon rolls out encryption for Ring doorbells  in ZDNet

Privacy advocates have been asking for Amazon to encrypt its popular Ring doorbells audio and video traffic, and Amazon is finally delivering it.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Zero Day | July 13, 2021 -- 19:02 GMT (12:02 PDT) | Topic: Security

Did you know that that handy video your Ring doorbell takes of anyone coming by your door isn't private? If you get a Ring Protect Plan, not only are your videos kept in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, your videos can still be seen by outsiders. A sufficiently motivated hacker, or your local police force, can easily watch who's walking by your door. Until now. Starting today in the US (and soon, throughout the world), you'll be able to encrypt your video stream to keep it private.

When deciding on a work safe security system. Whether for a large or small business, these 10 options for commercial properties will help secure your workplace.

This is done with Amazon's Video End-to-End Encryption (E2EE). If you decide to install this optional privacy feature, you'll need to install a new version of the Ring application on your smartphone. Once installed, it uses a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security system based on an RSA 2048-bit asymmetric account signing key pair. In English, the foundation is pretty darn secure....,

Examining End-to-End Encryption

Good piece, especially interesting the drawbacks of general end to end encryption are less obvious. 

End-to-End Encryption: Important Pros and Cons   by Shelby Hiter  in  CIOInsight

 According to the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report by Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, data breaches are costing enterprises $3.86 million on average, and they’re taking an average of 280 days to discover the problem. Clearly, hackers can and already do easily identify and access both corporate and personal information when files are transmitted from device to device unless certain cybersecurity measures are put into place. End-to-end encryption is the easiest solution for protecting this data so it doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

End-to-end encryption is the practice of encrypting data and information as it passes from device to device. The sending and receiving devices can see the original contents, but no other interceptors have the correct keys to decrypt the message. This approach to cybersecurity offers many benefits to companies and users that implement the protection, but there are still some drawbacks in areas like consumer-provider relationships. Read on to learn more about how end-to-end encryption works, as well as some of the pros and cons of end-to-end encryption security.  ... " 

Book: End-to-end Encrypted Messaging

Continue to make my way through this excellent and detailed book.    Rolf Oppliger's site describes this book and others he has written.   Plus his company's ongoing research and work.   Order it below.

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging Hardcover – April 30, 2020   by Rolf Oppliger  (Author)

This exciting resource introduces the core technologies that are used for Internet messaging. The book explains how Signal protocol, the cryptographic protocol that currently dominates the field of end to end encryption (E2EE) messaging, is implemented and addresses privacy issues related to E2EE messengers. The Signal protocol and its application in WhatsApp is explored in depth, as well as the different E2EE messengers that have been made available in the last decade are also presented, including SnapChat. It addresses the notion of self-destructing messages (as originally introduced by SnapChat) and the use of metadata to perform traffic analysis.

Homomorphic Standards, Sample Efforts

Very useful piece with links to alternate standards and company efforts underway.  Much more at the link

Homomorphic Encryption Standardization

An Open Industry / Government / Academic Consortium to Advance Secure Computation

Standards Meetings

Additional introductory material on homomorphic encryption can be found on the Homomorphic Encryption Wikipedia page.

STANDARDIZATION

There are several reasons why we think this is the right time to standardize homomorphic encryption.

There is already dire need for easily available secure computation technology, and this need will be getting stronger as more companies and individuals switch to cloud storage and computing. Homomorphic encryption is already ripe for mainstream use, but the current lack of standardization is making it difficult to start using it.

Specifically, the current implementations are not easy enough to use by non-experts. The standard will push to uniformize and simplify their API, and educate the application developers about to use them.

The security properties of RLWE-based homomorphic encryption schemes can be hard to understand. The standard will present the security properties of the standardized scheme(s) in a clear and understandable form.

BASICS OF HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION

Fully homomorphic encryption, or simply homomorphic encryption, refers to a class of encryption methods envisioned by Rivest, Adleman, and Dertouzos already in 1978, and first constructed by Craig Gentry in 2009. Homomorphic encryption differs from typical encryption methods in that it allows computation to be performed directly on encrypted data without requiring access to a secret key. The result of such a computation remains in encrypted form, and can at a later point be revealed by the owner of the secret key.... "

FHE for Using Encrypted Data

Very nicely done piece on the seeming paradox of FHE:

IBM Makes Encryption Paradox Practical  in IEEE Spectrum.

“Fully homomorphic” cryptography allows partial access to digital vaults without ever opening their locks  By Dan Garisto

How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside? This riddle may seem confounding, but its digital equivalent is now so solvable that it’s becoming a business plan. 

IBM is the latest innovator to tackle the well-studied cryptographic technique called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which allows for the processing of encrypted files without ever needing to decrypt them first. Earlier this month, in fact, Big Blue introduced an online demo for companies to try out with their own confidential data. IBM’s FHE protocol is inefficient, but it’s workable enough still to give users a chance to take it for a spin. 

Today’s public cloud services, for all their popularity, nevertheless typically present a tacit tradeoff between security and utility. To secure data, it must stay encrypted; to process data, it must first be decrypted. Even something as simple as a search function has required data owners to relinquish security to providers whom they may not trust. .... "

See IBM's   Homomorphic Encryption Services demonstration  "  Unlock the value of sensitive data without decryption to preserve privacy .. " 

Weakness Imperils Encryption

 Click through to access Bloomberg.   Regarding use of quantum computing.   Following up on details.

A Swiss Company Says It Found Weakness That Imperils Encryption

By Ryan Gallagher  in Bloomberg

February 7, 2021, 2:00 AM EST

 Discovery upends thinking on ‘what constitutes unbreakable’   Scientists want to see the data before declaring breakthrough ...'

In Livemint:  3 min read .  

Bloomberg

Security experts have long worried that advances in quantum computing could eventually make it easier to break encryption that protects the privacy of people’s data. That’s because these sophisticated machines can perform calculations at speeds impossible for conventional computers, potentially enabling them to crack codes previously thought indecipherable.

Security experts have long worried that advances in quantum computing could eventually make it easier to break encryption that protects the privacy of people’s data. That’s because these sophisticated machines can perform calculations at speeds impossible for conventional computers, potentially enabling them to crack codes previously thought indecipherable.

Now, a Swiss technology company says it has made a breakthrough by using quantum computers to uncover vulnerabilities in commonly used encryption. The company believes it’s found a security weakness that could jeopardize the confidentiality of the world’s internet data, banking transactions and emails. .... " 

3 

Getting Around Smartphone Encryption

Being discussed, security and how it is being circumvented.

How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone's Encryption

in Wired, Lily Hay Newman,  January 15, 2021

Analysis by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) cryptographers revealed encryption-circumventing schemes that law enforcement agencies use to access information in Android and iOS smartphones. JHU's Maximilian Zinkus said iOS has infrastructure for hierarchical encryption, yet little is actually used. The researchers found vulnerabilities in the iPhone's After First Unlock security, triggered after users unlock their phone the first time after a reboot; encryption keys begin getting stored in quick access memory even as the phone is locked, at which point a hacker could find and exploit iOS bugs to grab keys that are accessible in memory, and decrypt big chunks of data from the device. Reports from Israeli law enforcement contractor Cellebrite and U.S. forensic access firm Grayshift indicated most smartphone access tools probably operate in this manner. Android phones lack a Complete Lock mechanism after first unlock, meaning forensic tools can steal even more decryption keys, and compromise more data.  ... ' 

Europe Bets on China’s ‘Unhackable’ Tech for Encryption

 China and its secure communication broadband

Europe Bets on China’s ‘Unhackable’ Tech to Win Space Race  By Helene Fouquet Jan 05 2021

  (Bloomberg) -- Europe’s space industry will try to match Chinese advances in secure communications to gain an edge over satellite broadband networks including British-backed OneWeb, France’s most senior space official said.  Chinese scientists have developed what they say is an “unhackable” form of global satellite communications that draws upon quantum physics to encrypt signals, and launched a satellite in 2016 to test the nascent technology  ... '

Homomorphic Encryption Environment

More on what IBM is doing in the space of 'Fully Homomorphic Encryption', which is now including 'quantum safe' capabilities.   Here is a definition of that capability from the WP.

Now IBM is putting out an experimental capability for testing.

IBM launches experimental homomorphic data encryption environment for the enterprise

Is it possible for fully homomorphic encryption to be a “game-changer” for data privacy? IBM intends to find out.

IBM has launched a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) test service for the enterprise in the first step to bringing in-transit encrypted data analysis into the commercial sector. 

IBM said on Thursday that the new FHE solution, IBM Security Homomorphic Encryption Services, will allow clients to start experimenting with how the technology could be implemented to enhance the privacy of their existing IT architecture, products, and data. 

FHE, considered by some as the "Holy Grail" of encryption, as it is a form of encryption that allows data to remain encrypted when being processed. 

The concept behind FHE is to plug the gap between securely-encrypted data held in storage and the need to decrypt while this information is in use -- a requirement in data processing or analysis -- which can create protection issues.  ... " 

Signal Encryption Protocol

More attempts to decrease surveillance?

Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Signal Encryption Protocol?

As the Signal protocol becomes the industry standard, it's worth understanding what sets it apart from other forms of end-to-end encrypted messaging.

LAST WEEK, WITH little fanfare, Google announced a change that could soon make its 2 billion Android users worldwide far harder to surveil: The tech giant says it's rolling out a beta version of its Android messaging app that will now use end-to-end encryption by default. That level of encryption, while limited to one-on-one conversations, is designed to prevent anyone else from eavesdropping—not phone carriers, not intelligence agencies, not a hacker who has taken over the local Wi-Fi router, not even Google itself will have the keys to decrypt and read those billions of messages. .... '

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging

 Just started to read, excellent overview. Will follow with more comments as it applies to my work.

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging Hardcover – April 30, 2020   by Rolf Oppliger  (Author)

This exciting resource introduces the core technologies that are used for Internet messaging. The book explains how Signal protocol, the cryptographic protocol that currently dominates the field of end to end encryption (E2EE) messaging, is implemented and addresses privacy issues related to E2EE messengers. The Signal protocol and its application in WhatsApp is explored in depth, as well as the different E2EE messengers that have been made available in the last decade are also presented, including SnapChat. It addresses the notion of self-destructing messages (as originally introduced by SnapChat) and the use of metadata to perform traffic analysis.