Forgive me if this is an obvious stupid question, but with all this talk (again) about the EU trying to force chat platforms to check the content of its messages, I can help but think: how are they ever going to prevent me and my friend from sharing public keys and using them to encrypt our messages to each other? In other words: how are they ever going to be able to ban encryption?
Pretty easy honestly.
You do something like remove section 230 (or whatever the EU equivalent is) that provides safe harbor from liability for transit providers like ISPs and content providers like websites that host user submitted content. You condition any safe harbor on the services in question being able to turn over and ID exactly who the offending person was without fail and tie any and every packet to a real world person. You make explicit that not being able to scrutinize content (because of encryption) is not an excuse. Thus someone pirating or sending CSAM over your network via a VPN makes you liable for not stopping them.
As a result this forces ISPs to block all encrypted traffic detected via deep packet inspection. Only traffic encrypted with public key infrastructure that has government issued keys that allow snooping on it is allowed.
Tada. There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways. Things like embedding a secret message in pictures you send with some pixels shifted to hide the data and your friend having a program and key that can decode it. Or things like taking all the capitalized letters and applying rot13 or something to them with some sort of algorithm but then you need to find a way to make the message intelligible on the surface as if you’re sending constant unintelligible messages you might get flagged and blocked or visited by the police (or the police get a warrant and have your mobile company deploy malware onto your devices and spy on you as a threat because of that).
The only other alternative is using alternative infrastructure. HAM radio type network transmission via a series of hops with similar activists but this wouldn’t be practical for most given the expense and the bandwidth would be awful. Also probably illegal and if they wanted to it would be trivially easy to identify and arrest those running these nodes and relays due to triangulation.
Turns out the whole liberal west with freedom of thought and speech was in fact a lie. Kept around to use as a stick to whack at the USSR with but now dropped at the first signs of serious popular discontent and trouble in favor of total control. Supposed values quickly dropped with no more excuse than “Russians” or “think of the children” or the usual criminals and terrorists.
They can’t stop a really determined actor from engaging in encrypted messaging but they can stop 98% of the population and that’s more than enough to control thought and action of the population.
It so happens that I enjoy sending data indistinguishable from garbage. Kind of like advertisements, but more meta. No, I’ve never heard of this person, “N. Criptian” you keep taking about. I’ll be on my way to my attorney’s office now.
Does anti-DPI software not counter this?
@[email protected] @[email protected]
As both a fairly power user of LLMs and someone who tinkers with ciphers a lot (including creating my own techniques), I can guarantee: Markov chains aren’t smart enough to detect well-elaborate ciphers.
I’ll give an example: Let focus on plain characters.
The previous phrase contains a hidden message. It’s not simply an acrostic (when a word is formed by every initial letter from a sentence/verses/paragraphs), it’s an acrostic with Caesar cipher. And it’s not simply Caesar cipher, it’s a Caesar cipher with increasing shifting (decreasing when decoding):
L (-0 -> L), F (-1 -> E), O (-2 -> M), P (-3 -> M), C (-4 -> Y as it wraps around from A back to Z) => LEMMY
I can guarantee you, as someone who tested every single LLM out there: they’re unable to detect these kinds of ciphers. And it gets worse when we consider the possibility of adding other layers of ciphering: nothing stops me from adding Vigenere on top of Caesar, associating the letter with the corresponding number, then getting the nth prime at that position, and using wrap-add to add letters to produce another letter (okay, this is a very complicated example).
Also, when I say “creating my own techniques”, I’m not joking. I’ll present you with a cipher I created:
Maceió, Niterói, Rio Branco, Palmas, São Luís, Varginha.
Believe it or not, the previous list of Brazilian cities hides the word “BRAZIL”. How? List each Brazilian state alphabetically (excluding Distrito Federal as it’s an administrative state rather than a common state), and you’ll get a list with exactly 26 states. And what else have 26 elements? The English alphabet. Map each alphabetical letter not just to the state (e.g. L, the 12th letter, would be Minas Gerais), but to a city within that state (e.g. Varginha):
Maceió = Alagoas = 2nd from ordered list of states = B
Niterói = Rio de Janeiro state = 18th = R
Rio Branco = Acre = 1st = A
Palmas = Tocantins = 26th = Z
São Luís = Maranhão = 9th = I
Varginha = Minas Gerais = 12th = L
Again, creativity is the only limit. One can wrap it in steganography, use random coordinates and then map each digit to letters to form a long text… There’s no way to stop end-to-end encryption when two or more people have enough knowledge to convey their own tool chain of ciphering techniques. And LLMs will be clueless. Even human censors would be clueless.