Obama: cryptographers who don't believe in magic ponies are "fetishists," "absolutists"

[Hypnosifl]

@Nonentity

Well, yes, of course it’s speculation. Precisely because there is not enough detail in your hypothetical to do anything but speculate. And such speculation remains worthless, because1) it’s vanishingly unlikely that your perfect-world scenario where the math, people, and implementations are 100% perfect will ever exist[/quote]
As I said, the mathematics question is conceptually quite distinct from the the implementation question. It’s either mathematically possible to have a scheme like this with the required difficulty of cracking the key given the appropriate limit on the number of computational steps and computing power (limits based on what real-world computers could realistically do in several decades), or it isn’t; there shouldn’t be any gray area or ambiguity about the answer to this question, and neither of us has the expertise to say anything very confidently about this, nor found any sources where experts address it.

[quote=“Nonentity, post:144, topic:74972”]2) the experts who actually do solidly know the challenges involved have almost universally said there is no good way to do it, and that trying to have both a secure system for individual users and one that can be broken at will by the government is trying to have your cake and eat it too. And that it would be silly to try, because you won’t be able to prevent the really secure encryption from being used by criminals.

If you really think you can look up something on StackExchange and prove all those experts wrong, well… good luck.

That’s a strawman, I haven’t said anything about proving any experts wrong. My citing of the stackexchange post was again purely in reference to the mathematical issue, which I gather is not an issue you’ve seen any experts address. And I certainly am willing to grant the cryptography experts are almost certainly right in what they say about the impossibility of implementing a safe scheme of the type government authorities currently want, but see the comment I made below to ActionAbe about being unsure if any experts had ever really addressed the question of a much more limited scheme:

@Hypnosifl

I’d be curious if they’ve only dismissed the types of schemes proposed by advocates of giving law enforcement a key that would allow for routine breaking into devices of a wide range of types of suspects by a very large number of different officials, and doing so remotely, or if they have also considered the possibility of a scheme like the one I imagined where only a small number of officials would have access to hard copies of the key (or sections of the key) under carefully monitored-conditions that required having the actual physical device in their hands in a room with no internet connection, forcing the government to pick and choose very carefully the devices it breaks into since under such a scheme it might only be feasible to do maybe a few hundred a year in the entire country.

But japhroaig seems to be knowledgeable about these matters and has indicated that even a more limited scheme would be impossible to implement in a reasonably secure way, so I assume this is probably right (though I’d be interested to see more experts weigh in on the question of such extremely limited schemes); but then japhroaig hadn’t commented when I offered my earlier speculations. A response from someone knowledgable was exactly what I was hoping for when I raised these ideas, even if the tone you (Nonentity) have taken in your responses seems to suggest you mistakenly believed I was some kind of partisan trying to confidently suggest the scheme I proposed would work.