The Crypto Wars
The long argument over who may hold strong encryption. Public-key cryptography, PGP and the prosecution threat against Phil Zimmermann, the Clipper chip, export rules that classified cryptography as a munition, and the same fight resurfacing decades later in Apple versus the FBI.
Part of Cybersecurity
31 moments in this segment.
- — Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. whose 1976 paper 'New Directions in Cryptography' introduced public-key exchange and made civilian cryptography possible. Everything in the crypto wars, and every HTTPS session, descends from that paper. Commons carries no date for this file. The subject dates from 1976; the photograph itself is later.
- — Phil Zimmermann, portrait. A close portrait of Phil Zimmermann, licensed by Zimmermann himself for encyclopaedic use. PGP's release in 1991 is the moment strong public-key cryptography escaped governments and banks and reached ordinary people. Note the file's own date is 2010. The subject dates from 1991; the photograph itself is later.
- — The MYK-78 Clipper chip. The actual NSA-designed MYK-78 'Clipper' chip, photographed and released CC BY by researcher Travis Goodspeed. Announced in 1993, Clipper would have encrypted phone calls while escrowing a key for law enforcement. Matt Blaze found a flaw in its LEAF checksum in 1994 and public opposition killed it, setting the terms of every backdoor debate since. The subject dates from 1993; the photograph itself is later.
- — The information highway: security, commerce and democracy. A panel including David Farber and Barbara Simons debates security, commerce and democratic accountability on the emerging information highway. It captures the policy assumptions in circulation just as the crypto wars were opening.
- — Cryptography and privacy at the first HOPE. Bob Stratton introduces cryptography and privacy to the audience of the first Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York. The talk sets out the terms of the public policy fight over encryption as it stood in 1994.
- — Phil Zimmermann on The Screen Savers. TechTV's The Screen Savers interviews Phil Zimmermann about Pretty Good Privacy, the encryption program he released in 1991. Zimmermann describes how publishing strong cryptography brought him to the attention of the US government.
- — Steven Levy on the end of privacy. Journalist Steven Levy discusses Crypto, his account of how a loose group of researchers and activists forced strong encryption into public hands against government resistance. The talk was given at the 92nd Street Y around the book's publication.
- — Phil Zimmermann speaking at HAL 2001. Phil Zimmermann, author of PGP, lecturing at the Hackers At Large camp in Enschede in August 2001. Zimmermann released PGP free in 1991 and spent three years under federal criminal investigation for 'munitions export' because strong cryptography was legally a weapon. The case was dropped in 1996 and effectively ended US export controls on civilian crypto.
- — Information security before and after public-key cryptography. Whitfield Diffie traces information security through the twentieth century and the transformation brought by public-key cryptography in the 1970s. He treats the discovery as a break with centuries of key distribution practice.
- — Whit Diffie at Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2007. Diffie at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in 2007. CFP was where cryptographers, lawyers and civil-liberties groups fought out the policy side of security through the 1990s and 2000s.
- — Phil Zimmermann on VoIP encryption at Stanford. Zimmermann lectures at the Stanford Computer Systems Colloquium on encrypting voice over IP and on how the encryption debate had shifted since the 1990s. He describes the move from a civil liberties argument to one framed around surveillance.
- — The RSA Conference Cryptographers' Panel, 2008. The 2008 RSA Conference cryptographers' panel: Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Burt Kaliski on one stage. Between them they invented public-key exchange and RSA. This annual panel is the closest thing the field has to a state-of-the-union.
- — Distributed FPGA number crunching at 27C3. Felix Domke shows how commodity FPGAs can reproduce the brute-force capability of the EFF's Deep Crack machine, which walked the 56-bit DES keyspace in 1998 at a cost of 250,000 dollars. The talk measures how far the economics of key search had moved in twelve years.
- — The Diffie-Hellman key exchange. A short animated account of how two parties can agree on a shared secret in the open, and of the history behind public key cryptography. It explains the idea that made encrypted communication between strangers possible.
- — Has the NSA won the crypto wars?. A policy panel convened after reporting alleged that the NSA had weakened commercial products and cryptographic standards. Panelists debate what the disclosures mean for trust in security engineering.
- — Cindy Cohn on the second crypto war. EFF legal director Cindy Cohn argues that efforts to weaken encryption leave everyone less secure. She draws on the organisation's litigation history from the first crypto war of the 1990s.
- — The NSA and FBI push for new backdoors. Coverage of FBI director James Comey's testimony against strong encryption before the Senate Intelligence Committee, alongside the parallel British push for exceptional access. Leading security researchers had published a paper opposing the proposals.
- — Phil Zimmermann interviewed on Newsnight. BBC Newsnight meets Phil Zimmermann at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He recounts the years in which US authorities treated his encryption software as a munitions export and investigated him as an arms dealer.
- — Why tech companies may be winning the encryption argument. A news segment on reports that the Obama administration was stepping back from demands for guaranteed access to encrypted data. It places the shift in the context of the Snowden disclosures.
- — Phil Zimmermann on communications security. Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP and co-founder of Silent Circle, speaks at Google about deploying end-to-end encrypted communications at scale. He covers the engineering and organisational obstacles to making secure messaging ordinary.
- — Apple's counsel testifies that a back door endangers encryption. Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell tells lawmakers that strong encryption is the best protection for users and that mandated access would undermine it. The testimony came during the dispute over the San Bernardino iPhone.
- — Updates from the trenches of the second crypto war. A HOPE conference session on the renewed push by law enforcement for surveillance-friendly technology mandates. Speakers review the going dark argument and the legislative proposals attached to it.
- — The iCloud password reset behind the Apple standoff. A report that the iCloud password on the San Bernardino shooter's phone was reset by a county employee working with the FBI shortly after the device was recovered. The reset closed off a route to the data that would not have required a court order.
- — The FBI and Apple face off at a congressional hearing. Amy Hess of the FBI's science and technology branch is questioned about relying on outside contractors to unlock seized iPhones. The exchange came as the bureau sought access to a phone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers.
- — The FBI unlocks the San Bernardino iPhone. The Justice Department announces it has accessed the encrypted iPhone without Apple's assistance, ending the court fight but leaving the legal question open. A Wall Street Journal reporter discusses what the outcome settles and what it does not.
- — Backdoors, going dark and the encryption dilemma. A long-form conversation between technologists and law enforcement voices on exceptional access to encrypted products. It lays out the competing claims about investigative capability and systemic security.
- — Diffie and Hellman receive the Turing Award. The ACM presents Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman with the A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to modern cryptography. Their 1976 work made it possible for two parties to communicate privately over an insecure channel.
- — Frederic Jacobs on master keys and mobile privacy. A talk arguing that proposals to build master keys into consumer devices create risks that cannot be contained. Jacobs frames phones as repositories of the most sensitive personal information.
- — Martin Hellman on the evolution of public key cryptography. Hellman revisits the path he, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle took to public key cryptography, and why the idea took so long to surface. The talk was given at the Stanford Computer Systems Colloquium.
- — Cypherpunks Write Code. A four-part documentary on the cypherpunk movement, covering the fight over cryptography export controls and the campaign to make strong encryption publicly available. It draws on interviews with participants from the 1990s mailing list.
- — Privacy International on the politics of the crypto wars. A long discussion between Privacy International staff on the history of encryption policy, led by a colleague who has worked on the debate since the 1990s. It covers the export-control fights, the recurring push for lawful access, and why the same arguments keep returning.
