Security Is Not Enough: Privacy in Encryption Regulation and Lawful-Surveillance Protocols

This article argues that security is not enough to fully capture what is at stake in government exceptional access to encrypted data. A conception of privacy as security has little to say about "lawful-surveillance protocols'' -- an active research agenda in cryptography that aims to enable...

WhatsApp refuses to weaken encryption, would rather leave UK

WhatsApp will not comply with the UK's Online Safety Bill when it passes legislation as is. In fact, WhatsApp would rather cease serving UK users, which make up 2% of its global market, than weaken its end-to-end encryption E2EE. Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at parent company Meta, made these...

A week in security (May 9 – 15)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: How to spot the signs of a virtual kidnap scam Virtual credit cards coming to Chrome: What you need to know Clearview AI banned from selling facial recognition data in the US Cyberattacks on SATCOM networks attributed to Russian threat actors F5 BIG-IP vulnerabilit...

Client side scanning may cost more than it delivers

On May 11, 2022, the EU will publicize a proposal for a law on mandatory chat control. The European Commission wants all providers of email, chat and messaging services to search for suspicious messages in a fully automated way and forward them to the police in the fight against child pornography...

UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption

Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably theyll lean heavily on the "think of the children!" rhetoric were seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars. The technical eavesdroppin...

Security Risks of Client-Side Scanning

Even before Apple made its announcement, law enforcement shifted their battle for backdoors to client-side scanning. The idea is that they wouldnt touch the cryptography, but instead eavesdrop on communications and systems before encryption or after decryption. Its not a cryptographic backdoor, b...

More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp

Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans. The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a...