Between the NSA and the players in the Silicon Valley, the gap is widening. When Cybersecurity for a new America conference that was held yesterday in Washington, the head of security of information systems at Yahoo has had a rather scathing exchange with Mike Rogers, director of the NSA, on the issue of encryption.
The debate has raged for some time now: the revelations of Edward Snowden, more and more companies offer their customers an encryption of their data in order to be able to ensure the confidentiality of their exchanges. And this effort does not seem vain, since many times politicians or officials of the security forces have raised concerns with respect to these ciphers solutions.
scale Deployed particularly sophisticated, they are indeed in their obstacle in some surveys. For the proponents of this approach, security solution publishers should allow the establishment of backdoors to allow access of the authorities, but many experts in cryptography recall that these operations can be operated by anyone.
The exchange transcribed by the US blog Just Security, is a perfect example of misunderstanding that exists between the two worlds. Interviewing the director of the NSA about the possible introduction of backdoors in encryption tools, Alex Stamos referred to the necessarily international aspect of the question: “If we put in place specific access for the US government, do you that knowing that we have 1.3 billion users around the world, we should also establish similar means to the Chinese government? For Russia? Saudi Arabia? Or France? To which country should give us access? »
A question that has obviously bad about the director of the NSA ease: it conceded that “it was an aspect to be clarified,” but did not give a clear answer to the problem posed by the RSSI Yahoo. Mike Rogers was content to reiterate the need to establish a legal framework to give legitimacy to the activities of the NSA and FBI, in order to have some form of democratic control over these practices. An argument swept Stamos, recalling that foreign governments could also have laws governing such access.
At the conference, Mike Rogers acknowledged that the US cyber defense was “not mature” and compared the development and use of digital tools in the context of war to the problems of the nuclear bomb during the twentieth century . He recalled that the theories surrounding the nuclear deterrent and the concept of mutually assured destruction have decades before being put clearly in terms of international politics, and concedes that the spy tools are still far from having a framework for action as clearly defined.
In other words, the NSA still holds its backdoors, but now balk at hiding.
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