Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Season May Start Earlier Next Year

So the powers that be want crypto that they can break at will. All of us want strong crypto, cause we know anything less, and everyone, from foreign governments to crackers, will constantly be breaking in. It seems like only one side can prevail.

I'm just wondering: Why don't we chain strong crypto?

Alice & Bob each have their own public/private keys. Alice is the only one with her private key. Bob is the only one with his private key. Private keys are kept strictly local. Okay, so far so good.

Now what if Alice & Bob's locally-kept private keys are stored a second time, this time encrypted with BigCompany's public key, and the encrypted result is cached strictly locally in some accessible manner if you have physical hardware access?

BigCompany now has the ability to obtain Alice & Bob's private keys. It might mean sending Alice's phone back to BigCompany just to access the protected enclave and read BigCompany's public key encrypted version of Alice's private key data, and you'd certainly have to send Alice's phone back to BigCompany to decrypt it, but it could be done.

And if there was a compromise of BigCompany's private key, they could rekey every phone (or whatever) with an over the air update. They wouldn't have to decrypt anything, just re-encrypt the already encrypted private key with a new public key.

I know a lot of folks won't like the idea of big brother being able to force open their phones. On the other hand, when we lose our keys, we're all really grateful to the locksmith who can let us in. For a fee, and completely legally aboveboard, of course.

Okay, I know there's a reason folks don't do this. I'm just not entirely clear as to what it is... Oppressive regimes maybe?

Source: Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Season May Start Earlier Next Year