There’s been an increasing call in recent weeks and months for encryption to have government ‘backdoors’ put into them. This is a bad idea. No really, it’s an incredibly bad idea. Even if we took the assumption that it is a push that’s made with only the purest of intentions, and the government universal key is kept 100% safe and secure and never leaked or misused, it’s still a really, unbelievably, stupid idea.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Great article, and spot on about why backdoors in algorithms can’t functionally happen large scale.
One important thing to note that’s touched lightly on in the article though, is that services absolutely can have backdoors. That includes things like SMS messages, which go through various cell phone companies servers, and email, which is stored on your email provider’s servers, as well as common chat apps like Discord. So, if you have to send something sensitive via an uncontrolled channel like that, encrypt it first (using separate encryption tools).