2017 Encryption Landscape

• By Mike Salas
• Dec 27, 2016

There is a growing belief that 2017 will be a decisive year in the battle over encryption that has been quietly raging for over 25 years.  This ongoing battle has pitted the federal government, who argues that some form of encryption backdoors are needed for national security purposes, against security professionals and privacy advocates, who argue that these types of backdoors are foolhardy at best and dangerous at worst.  The recent election of Donald Trump, the self-described “law-and-order” president, threatens to upend the shaky détente that currently exists between these two competing camps.  If early indications are true and Trump does in fact take a more strident approach towards issues of security and privacy, organizations and vendors alike will be facing a radically altered landscape in 2017.

For a preview of the type of changes that may be in store, one needs to look no further than to the UK, where a recently-passed bill, named the British Investigatory Powers Bill (aka “Snooper’s Charter”), is already causing widespread changes.  This new law allows the UK government to engage in online surveillance, to perform wholesale bulk collection of every citizen’s metadata, and to have the legal authority to hack into devices remotely.  Furthermore, the law enables the government to impose what is called a “technical capability notice” on a commercial entity, which would oblige them to change or modify their product to remove any form of electronic protection applied by the company to any communications or data.  In other words, the government is demanding that companies have the backdoor capability of removing the encryption that is being used to protect data.

The impact on commercial entities that deal with any sort of consumer or citizen data is becoming clear: they will be required to collect, store, maintain, and disclose this information when presented with a warrant.  While this will present data storage challenges to an organization, the greater fear is the worry about hacking.  For all the talk about safeguarding data, it’s now clear that it is virtually impossible to stop a determined hacker from compromising data.  In the last year alone, major commercial entities, such as Yahoo, Verizon and LinkedIn, have all been hacked.  In other words, it’s not a question of if a company will be hacked; it’s simply a question of when.  While companies will continue to try to find ways to prevent these hacks, 2017 will be the year of an increased focus on mitigating the impact of inevitable breaches.

On the flip side, security vendors, especially those that deal with encryption technology, will be faced with a dilemma.  Encryption is built on a foundation of math. If a backdoor weakness were purposely built in due to some type of mandate, then the mathematical underpinning of encryption will have an inherent vulnerability that will be identified and exploited by sophisticated hackers.  Furthermore, even if vendors were to put in a backdoor, it would have no real effect at stopping criminals due to the widespread availability of other tools and encryption services that go beyond the reach of federal authorities.  Thus, compliance with any sort of federal mandate will likely result in a significant commercial impact to the vendor’s business as clients migrate to other solutions or services.

To avoid the economic impact caused by the insertion of a backdoor, vendors will likely migrate toward an alternate deployment model that relies on “safe harbor” provisions.  Like the safe harbor provisions used within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), vendors will claim protection from monetary or legal liability based on the allegedly infringing activities of third parties.  For data being sent across the Internet, this can be achieved by implementing a more advanced encryption model that takes advantage of one-time use keys to protect the data being sent to and from different parties.  For statically stored data, this can be done by moving to a model where the keys used to unlock this stored data are uniquely tied to an individual using biometrics or other similar techniques.  In both models, because the keys are self-deleting and/or uniquely linked to the user, neither the vendor nor the organization can unlock this data themselves and thus cannot be subject to a court order.  Importantly, these approaches also provide an immediate security benefit by providing another protective layer against hackers who attempt to steal data.

The debate that started 25 years ago when the U.S. government attempted to regulate encryption in the early days of the Internet seems destined to explode into the limelight in 2017.  The national conversation that results will dramatically shape the encryption landscape for years to come.