Wikileaks shows why governments are petrified of encryption

Posted on 31 Aug 2010 at 12:00

The Wikileaks "insurance" document poses another encryption dilemma for the world's biggest security force

The RIM story isn't the only encryption-related headline grabber at the moment. The huge political power of cryptography was highlighted again when observers noticed an encrypted 1.4GB file on the Wikileaks whistleblowing website. The discovery came after the site published thousands of documents detailing the US's actions in Afghanistan.

The US described the release of the Afghanistan information as “dangerous” and is incandescent that Wikileaks says it has another 15,000 files to release – all the more so because there appears to be nothing the world's most powerful authority can do about it.

Whether or not the mystery file - insurance.aes256 - is actually the new documents remains unknown, but the founder of the site is certainly using the file as protection.

“We have for a long time distributed encrypted back-ups of material we have yet to release,” Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange told the BBC recently. “That means all we have to do is release the password to that material and it is instantly available. It means we can keep records of history safe from being destroyed regardless of the threats to this organisation.”

The filename gives two clues abouts its contents – that it's an insurance policy to protect the site's staff and has been encrypted using the AES256 algorithm.

According to Diffie, such encryption is probably well beyond the decryption techniques of even the National Security Agency. “PGP is a complicated system and I don't know if that could be decrypted,” he told PC Pro. “I am inclined to believe AES128 will last the century.”

I am inclined to believe AES128 will last the century

“The public cryptographic community has not been able to break it,” Diffie said. “Perhaps more significantly, the NSA issued a policy memorandum in 2003 saying that AES was usable for all levels of US classified traffic.”

With Wikileaks, there is at least an argument that encryption is being used for the public good, which means the internet's chattering classes have been largely supportive, but what happens when the UK Government really gets a bee in its bonnet over something it wants to access?

Public perception changes if we are talking encryption used to hide child pornography, or when there are genuine terror threats.

Author: Stewart Mitchell