Steve: Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, we have - I love the title of this post. This was from Joshua Lund, who is a sysadmin, programmer, privacy enthusiastic, security fan, writer, occasional cyclist, and one of the Signal developers, who posted at Signal.org last week. The title of his posting was "Setback in the Outback." And I lightly edited what he wrote for the podcast.
He said: "Like many others, we have been following the latest developments in Australia related to the Assistance and Access bill with a growing sense of frustration. The widespread adoption of strong cryptography and end-to-end encryption has given people around the world the ability to protect their personal information and communicate securely. Life is increasingly lived online, and the everyday actions of billions of people depend on this foundation remaining strong. Attempting," he writes, "to roll back the clock on security improvements which have massively benefited Australia and the entire global community is a disappointing development.
"More than eight years have passed since we released the public beta of what is now known as Signal. Throughout the entire development process, the project has faced resistance from people who struggle to understand end-to-end encryption or who seek to weaken its effects. This is not a new dynamic." He says, in a paragraph by itself: "We can't include a backdoor in Signal, but that isn't a new dynamic either.
"By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, your social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles, or group avatars. The end-to-end encrypted contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by keys that are entirely inaccessible to us. In most cases now we don't even have access to who is messaging whom.
"Everything we do is open source, and anyone is free to verify or examine the code for each release. Reproducible builds" - which is not easy, by the way - "and other readily accessible binary comparisons make it possible to ensure the code we distribute is what is actually running on users' devices. People often use Signal to share secrets with their friends, but we can't hide secrets in our software.
"Everyone benefits from these design choices, including Australian politicians. For instance, it has been widely reported that Malcolm Turnbull, the 29th Prime Minister of Australia, is a Signal user. He isn't alone. Members of government everywhere use Signal. Even if we disagree with Christian Porter, we would never be able to access his Signal messages, regardless of whether the request comes from his own government or any other government.
"Although we can't include a backdoor in Signal, the Australian government could attempt to block the service or restrict access to the app itself. Historically, this strategy hasn't worked very well. Whenever services get blocked, users quickly adopt VPNs or other network obfuscation techniques to route around the restrictions. If a country decided to apply pressure on Apple or Google to remove certain apps from their regional stores, switching to a different region is trivial on both Android and iOS, and popular apps are widely mirrored across the Internet. Some of them can even be downloaded directly from their official website.
"One of the myriad ways that the 'Assistance and Access' [in quotes] bill is particularly terrible," he writes, "lies in its potential to isolate Australians from the services that they depend on and use every day. Over time, users may find that a growing number of apps no longer behave as expected. New apps might never launch in Australia at all."
He finishes: "Technology organizations looking to open offices in a new country could decide that AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time) isn't such a great time zone after all. As remote work continues to become more prevalent, will companies start saying 'goodbye,'" he writes, "instead of 'g'day' to applicants from Australia, who are unable to sufficiently secure and encrypt their corporate communications?" He says: "This doesn't seem like smart politics, but nothing about this bill seems particularly smart. We remain committed to fighting mass surveillance worldwide. We encourage users in Australia to reach out to their representatives and express their opposition to the Assistance and Access Bill." And it's interesting. I looked around for other reaction to that, and haven't so far found anything.
Leo: 1Password posted a blog post. ProtonMail posted a blog post.
Steve: Good.
Leo: So a number of people have responded. I hope LastPass will say something. But it does raise some questions in my mind. So I have some questions for you.
Steve: Okay.
Leo: About this law, the Triple A law, which hasn't yet gone into effect. I think it doesn't go into effect till next year.
Steve: Until Parliament meets at the beginning of 2019, yes.
Leo: And so there's some chance that maybe they'll change it or retract it. And we don't know how strongly, assiduously it'll be enforced. But it says, essentially, that anybody who provides encrypted services must be able to provide unencrypted cleartext versions for law enforcement if they ask.
Steve: Yup.
Leo: Which means Signal provides encrypted services. ProtonMail provides encrypted services. LastPass and 1Password provide encrypted services. It sounds like they'd have to, you know, LastPass, we just did the ad, says we don't ever have access to your vault. Only you do.
Steve: We absolutely know for a fact that they don't.
Leo: Yeah. It's trust, what you call "trust no one," end to end. Or another way to put it is end-to-end encryption. So the question is, does that mean they have to then modify their code to sell it in Australia, so that when requested they can provide cleartext? And it's my understanding that it does.
Steve: So one interesting thing that I - because I've been thinking about this for the last week. One of the ways the world has evolved is that applications no longer talk to the hardware directly. They talk to an API which the operating system publishes. So it could be, you know, we've often talked about this idea of accessing communications either before they're encrypted or after they're decrypted. Well, there is a common place where the keyboard API exists. The video API, the screen output API, and that's this OS layer.
And so it could be, I mean, I don't know, we don't know how this is going to evolve. But it could be that Android and iOS themselves could provide a pre-encryption and post-decryption interface because, after all, as we've often said, I mean, the user is entering plaintext into their keyboard, and they are viewing plaintext on their screen. That plaintext transits from the encrypted tunnel through the operating system after it's been decrypted.
So what we may end up with is a general design which would - the advantage, first of all, it means that our phones do have this - our operating systems have a designed-in monitoring facility. It isn't a backdoor into any of the encryption. It doesn't weaken any of the encryption. It just gets to it before it's been encrypted or decrypted, much like the user, typing on their keyboard, like a keystroke monitor. And so that's a means by which a universal solution could be found.
Leo: With the cooperation of Google and Apple.
Steve: With the cooperation of the operating system.
Leo: Actually, it wouldn't even be Google. It would have to be the manufacturer because Samsung would have to say, okay, we'll do that. Yeah.
Steve: Right, right.
Leo: And what we don't know is, yes, that would be a solution, but that would require Australian law enforcement to know and do it, as opposed to going to Signal and saying, no, you've got to do it.
Steve: Well, and then there's also the question of storage; right? Because, for example, we know in a point-to-point system there is some storage of received messages at the receiving end. But there's no central storage of prior messages by the provider. I mean, basically, Signal is providing a system that allows two people to interchange messages securely. The only storage occurs in the message stream at each end. So, for example, there doesn't exist, it's not like they don't want to provide it in the case of Signal's being able to provide past message traffic. It doesn't exist anywhere in a third location. So, as I said, I really think...
Leo: But wouldn't they have to - couldn't they be forced to rewrite Signal to provide that?
Steve: Well, yes. And what was...
Leo: That's the question. And what are the penalties? We don't know what that is.
Steve: And we sort of heard Signal's...
Leo: We just pull out of Australia. We wouldn't do it.
Steve: Exactly. If you guys don't want to allow security, we're about security. We are not going to compromise our security. If you don't want access to Signal, I mean, if the only way you'll allow us to be there is breaking encryption, we're just not...
Leo: Bye-bye.
Steve: We're just going to say no.
