Britain's long-awaited Online Safety Bill setting tougher standards for social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok has been agreed by parliament and will soon become law, the government said on Tuesday.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
Earlier this month, junior minister Stephen Parkinson appeared to concede ground, saying in parliament’s upper chamber that Ofcom would only require them to scan content where “technically feasible”.
Donelan said in response to questions about Parkinson’s statement that further work to develop the technology was needed but government-funded research had shown it was possible.
In practice, I doubt this will have any consequence on encryption, as the title of this post suggests.
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.
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.