this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
265 points (96.5% liked)
Privacy
32442 readers
772 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Right there in the article, my guy.
If you can scan encrypted messages then you've no longer got e2ee
1 line below, you can read
In practice, I doubt this will have any consequence on encryption, as the title of this post suggests.
Backdoors make it "technically feasible" to scan "e2ee". See, it's all a matter of perspective.
Fucking doublespeak (not you). If you can scan it then it isn’t e2ee. Words mean things. E2ee means that the two parties are the only two who can read the message. If there is a way to do any analysis on the message at all then it isn’t e2ee.
While I largely agree with you, technically it is still E2EE even if the encryption is very poor (e.g. hey look I shifted every character by one along the ASCII table).
Poor encryption could then be broken by a party in the middle.
All of that said this is a bit irrelevant, if the encryption is so poor the provider can break it at will, so can bad actors. We don't use broken (bad) encryption for a reason.
Companies also advertise e2ee while they generate and store the encryption keys on their server. So, it is encrypted all the way, but still easy enough to decrypt when needed. Very technically feasible and still strong against third parties.
But they're not mandating such backdoors it seems.
The title here said E2EE is made impossible, I was simply saying that is untrue. Clarity matters. It says in the article they removed the bit about banning encryption or requiring back doors to it before it passed.
The rest sucks, as I acknowledged, and they want to make it easier to scan devices that would include messages that have been decrypted upon arrival. There's already spyware they does exactly that. However, that doesn't make it so that E2EE is impossible.