[Cryptography] Licensing of cryptographic services in France

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 5:16 PM efc--- via cryptography <
cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:

>
> The choking points, if push comes to shove, are the ISP:s. The government
> will work with cryptography white lists, which consists of approved
> corporations which are allowed to send and received encrypted traffic
> through a countrys ISP:s. All the rest of the encrypted traffic will be
> blocked.
>

Not necessarily.

The Web is moving to use of QUIC for transport, that is a UDP transport
with TLS on top.

My system doesn't go over QUIC (yet). It is designed to use a transactional
message substrate in which messages are limited to 64KB or so (not sure
exactly, pending experience with ML-KEM and ML-DSA). That currently goes
over HTTPS but is designed to allow direct encapsulation in UDP.

The encapsulation scheme allows the sender and receiver to reserve the
first n bytes of each UDP packet. These may be used to establish a
steganographic layer. So you can wrap the Mesh traffic in what looks like a
QUIC session but is actually just thrown away.

Further, you can make use of TOR like routing to give a further degree of
masking. Bottom line is that we can run this in the places it is really
built for (Iran, Russia, Venezuela, etc.) and the authorities don't have a
Scooby's.


> Then it doesn't matter if there are multiple service providers, they will
> only be allowed to use encryption after getting certified on the
> government white list, which of course means leaking information at will,
> when the incompetent public sector wants it.
>

There are some parts of the US federal government that want that and there
are senior parts of the federal government which are far more interested in
enabling strong encryption in dictatorships. TOR was funded in part through
State dept money.

That will push solutions based on steganography, hiding encrypted
> information in non-encrypted streams. There will of course be a black
> market (the market always wins in the end, despite what todays socialist
> politicians want us to believe) for encrypted communication through white
> listed corporations. I read an article a long time ago, that this is how
> it works in china, were companies do sell internet connections to the west
> if you know who to ask through the right channels.
>

Yup. Already designed in.

I think, in the short term, that the west will increasingly look at, and
> copy china, when it comes to the view of free speech, and building a great
> firewall. But that will only push technologists and markets to up their
> level, so in the end, we'll benefit. The only sad part is that it will
> take a while.
>

Depends who wins in November. If it is Putin's people we are in a very
different place.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20240827/5c522f12/attachment.htm>