If you ask most people what’s been in Pandora’s Box when humanity has hurriedly rifled through it, they will probably mention the atomic bomb; the combustion engine; and the internet, perhaps. While revolutionary and un-put-backable those genies are, there’s a less obvious one that stands out to me because so much of society has been built around it in a way that’s invisible to many people - and that’s encryption. I don’t know why I waited this long to say it when it was in the title.
Throughout the decades since Alan Turing really went to town on those Enigma boxes, many mathematicians and engineers with several more degrees than your author here, have developed encryption to the point where it is now a harnessed energy in numerous forms. It’s fair to say that we have the recipe now.
Computers obviously were very helpful in this process, and with the internet boshing packets of data around and criminals looking for those packets, we now work under the presumption that we need to encrypt our bits.
Encryption works because the owners of the private key can encode and decode with relative ease, whereas even the most powerful supercomputers in the world would take years to break them. We have different levels of encryption - some considered too weak to use any more, and with them encryption and decryption have different costs in time and power.
Earlier methods that we’d barely even consider encryption today, have been broken by modern technology in various ways - brute-forcing, reverse engineering, exploiting bugs or mathematical minutiae within the algorithm itself - and some even allowing the existence of “rainbow tables”, a list of every possible encrypted value. It’s not something we thought was very plausible back when DOOM was first impressive, but computing progress has made algorithms many used to rely on for passwords into something you can trivially pop on the internet for, and find out exactly how the encrypted value decrypts.
A rainbow table in the wild
Capitalism urges us all forward to buy the next CPU, more memory and heftier graphics cards, phones that could have sent NASA to the moon a trillion times over just sat in our pockets, all the time raising the bar on home computing capabilities. Encryption algorithms must keep ahead of that ever-approaching steamroller.
For the time being though, we have a phenomenal level of encryption available (relative to technology’s ability to negate it), and it means that we can all have privacy in many aspects of our digital lives. The age-old argument of “well I have nothing to hide, why do I need that?”, while flawed in its own ways to start with, is simply no longer true on any level.
Things like keeping your own money, private accounts that deal with your medical history and implementing good security practices to help protect your employer from having their data stolen, all have their roots in encryption. Society has implicitly agreed we need it, by most of us putting any of our private information online.
It is generally only the aforementioned criminals who think your property should be their property, who push to break encryption. That’s what makes the UK government’s latest and frankly embarrassing demand to Apple for a backdoor to end-to-end encrypted cloud data all the more mortifying.
Allow me to spell it out for the very clever people at the Home Office, while trying my best not to use mocking, immature or offensive language:
If there’s a backdoor, then your stuff can be accessed via that backdoor, too.
I’d draw a flowchart of what would happen, except it would only have one circle, and that circle would be where all of our things are. There endeth the flowchart. Although by the sounds of it, there are some folk in our government who should probably have a read, so here it is:
I hope this helps.
Wishing away encryption for “security” is the most foot-shooting of all proposals, and it comes up for air every few years before the politician who mentioned it gets roundly cajoled by the entire security community. Doesn’t seem to stop them, mind.
Encryption is a truly wonderful, near-miraculous process that keeps everything sturdy. So there is, naturally, a rub.
A rub that takes us back to Pandora’s Box. Traditionally speaking, your common-or-garden Pandora’s Box item can’t be returned to the box, but we as a species are hurtling towards something riiiight near the bottom of said box - practical quantum computing. A functional quantum computer would laugh in the face of our modern-day encryption, if it could laugh - which it could because it’s quantum and therefore able to laugh and not laugh, at the same time.
The entire concept of privacy as we know it could be ripped asunder if world governments get what they secretly desire, and that pesky encryption can be side-stepped in a matter of milliseconds. Unlock any phone, decode any private image, access any bank account, any online account. Don’t make me tap the sign again.
