BACK DOORS AND FRONT DOORS BREAKING THE UNBREAKABLE SYSTEM

Governments are demanding backdoor access to encrypted data - particularly on mobile devices and in the cloud - as strong encryption becomes commonplace. Governments fear going dark with encryption hindering criminal and national security investigations. Privacy advocates have opposed backdoors since the 1990s and the battle is heating up again, this time on a global scale. Backdoors have also been criticized as making systems inherently less secure. Current proposals, such as key escrow, split-key systems, and account mirroring, are complicated and difficult to implement securely. We provide a background on end-to-end encryption, a techno-political history of backdoors, and an update on the current state of affairs. We explore various options for working around end-to-end encryption, focusing on implementation details and potential weakness due to administrative failure in procedures to request and obtain access and technical attacks on the implementation. We conclude with proposals to answer the lingering question of whether there is a solution that does not weaken encryption systems or mandate technological designs while still enabling limited government access to secure communications.