Rand Paul says he won’t ban encryption if president

[danda]

ftfy,

What is he going to encrypt the message with? Did you meet him in person to exchange public keys?

 

[adam220891]

ftfy,

Technically this guy is right. Public/private keys implies asymmetric encryption, where the private key must be kept safe. You could, however, meetup to establish a shared secret. DH makes physically meeting up or communicating out of band not necessary.

Anyway, isn't limiting encryption something communist and totalitarian nations do? Even if not banned, they might restrict you to DES or other weak algorithms which are easily crackable, so there's hardly a point.

We:
A) Have many federal compliance forcing the use of strong encryption (HIPAA for example) so it would be a legal mess to sort through that stuff
B) Don't want to be associated with the oppressive nations engaging in similar technical restrictions

This feels like an unneeded comment by Rand but if there's politicians out there actually advocating for this stuff then I guess someone has to speak up.

 

[CPUd]

I've seen variations of this article from different outlets over the weekend:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/16/technology/terrorists-go-dark/index.html

Someone is trying to redefine "going dark" to mean encrypted communications.

 

[Dr.3D]

I can imagine a huge increase of pictures being sent over the internet.

 

[CPUd]

 

[brandon]

What is he going to encrypt the message with? Did you meet him in person to exchange private keys?

No you never exchange private keys, he would sign it with his secret private key and we verify using the public key pair.

 

[timosman]

No you never exchange private keys, he would sign it with his secret private key and we verify using the public key pair.

If you see nothing wrong with this statement you might be an IT person. ;-)