[Cryptography] Encryption doesn't seem to have bothered organisations who aren't the FBI

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2019-11-16 20:35, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Maybe the next time the FBI claim that the existence of encryption will lead
> to the collapse of civilisation, they can ask the countries in the Joint
> Investigative Team (Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine)
> for help.  The use of Russian military encryption doesn't seem to have
> bothered them much.

The Joint Investigative Team knew that there were messages, but probably 
did not know what was in them.

Encryption conceals the content of a message, but does not conceal where 
a message is coming from or going to, which is likely to be of more 
interest than the content of a message.

For individuals in a big city contacting another individual in another 
big city, concealing the content may be more useful, but usually IPs 
leak rather specific identifying information.

If a big server sets up a UDT4 IP rendezvous between two clients, the 
server has rather too much information, since the rendezvous necessarily 
contains rather specific id information, but any information about the 
volume, timing, and pattern of the ensuing client to client conversation 
is apt to get lost in an immense pile of client to client interactions 
downloading movies over bittorrent.

So encryption wrapped in UDT4 would likely slow the FBI down a little.