[wordup] PGP encryption proves to be powerful

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110841,00.asp

PGP Encryption Proves Powerful

If the police and FBI can't crack the code, is the technology too strong?

Philip Willan, IDG News Service
Monday, May 26, 2003

ROME -- Italian police have seized at least two Psion personal digital 
assistants from members of the Red Brigades terrorist organization. But 
the major investigative breakthrough they were hoping for as a result of 
the information contained on the devices has failed to 
materialize--thwarted by encryption software used by the left-wing 
revolutionaries.

Failure to crack the code, despite the reported assistance of U.S. 
Federal Bureau of Investigation computer experts, puts a spotlight on 
the controversy over the wide availability of powerful encryption tools.

The Psion devices were seized on March 2 after a shootout on a train 
traveling between Rome and Florence, Italian media and sources close to 
the investigation said. The devices, believed to number two or three, 
were seized from Nadia Desdemona Lioce and her Red Brigades comrade 
Mario Galesi, who was killed in the shootout. An Italian police officer 
was also killed. At least one of the devices contains information 
protected by encryption software and has been sent for analysis to the 
FBI facility in Quantico, Virginia, news reports and sources said.

The FBI declined to comment on ongoing investigations, and Italian 
authorities would not reveal details about the information or equipment 
seized during the shootout.
Pretty Good Privacy

The software separating the investigators from a potentially invaluable 
mine of information about the shadowy terrorist group, which 
destabilized Italy during the 1970s and 1980s and revived its practice 
of political assassination four years ago after a decade of quiescence, 
was PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the Rome daily La Repubblica reported. So 
far the system has defied all efforts to penetrate it, the paper said.

Palm-top devices can only run PGP if they use the Palm OS or Windows CE 
operating systems, said Phil Zimmermann, who developed the encryption 
software in the early 1990s. Psion uses its own operating system known 
as Epoc, but it might still be possible to use PGP as a third party 
add-on, a spokesperson for the British company said.

There is no way that the investigators will succeed in breaking the code 
with the collaboration of the current manufacturers of PGP, the Palo 
Alto, California-based PGP, Zimmermann said in a telephone interview.

"Does PGP have a back door? The answer is no, it does not," he said. "If 
the device is running PGP it will not be possible to break it with 
cryptanalysis alone."

Investigators would need to employ alternative techniques, such as 
looking at the unused area of memory to see if it contained remnants of 
plain text that existed before encryption, Zimmermann said.
Privacy vs. Security

The investigators' failure to penetrate the PDA's encryption provides a 
good example of what is at stake in the privacy-versus-security debate, 
which has been given a whole new dimension by the September 11 terrorist 
attacks in the U.S.

Zimmermann remains convinced that the advantages of PGP, which was 
originally developed as a human rights project to protect individuals 
against oppressive governments, outweigh the disadvantages.

"I'm sorry that cryptology is such a problematic technology, but there 
is nothing we can do that will give this technology to everyone without 
also giving it to the criminals," he said. "PGP is used by every human 
rights organization in the world. It's something that's used for good. 
It saves lives."

Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union are examples of governments that 
had killed far more people than all the world's criminals and terrorists 
combined, Zimmermann said. It was probably technically impossible, 
Zimmermann said, to develop a system with a back door without running 
the risk that the key could fall into the hands of a Saddam Hussein or a 
Slobodan Milosevic, the former heads of Iraq and Yugoslavia, respectively.

"A lot of cryptographers wracked their brains in the 1990s trying to 
devise strategies that would make everyone happy and we just couldn't 
come up with a scheme for doing it," he said.

"I recognize we are having more problems with terrorists now than we did 
a decade ago. Nonetheless the march of surveillance technology is giving 
ever increasing power to governments. We need to have some ability for 
people to try to hide their private lives and get out of the way of the 
video cameras," he said.
More Good Than Harm?

Even in the wake of September 11, Zimmermann retains the view that 
strong cryptography does more good for a democracy than harm. His 
personal website, PhilZimmerman.com, contains letters of appreciation 
from human rights organizations that have been able to defy intrusion by 
oppressive governments in Guatemala and Eastern Europe thanks to PGP. 
One letter describes how the software helped to protect an Albanian 
Muslim woman who faced an attack by Islamic extremists because she had 
converted to Christianity.

Zimmermann said he had received a letter from a Kosovar man living in 
Scandinavia describing how the software had helped the Kosovo Liberation 
Army (KLA) in its struggle against the Serbs. On one occasion, he said, 
PGP-encrypted communications had helped to coordinate the evacuation of 
8,000 civilians trapped by the Serbs in a Kosovo valley. "That could 
have turned into another mass grave," Zimmermann said.

Italian investigators have been particularly frustrated by their failure 
to break into the captured Psions because so little is known about the 
new generation of Red Brigades. Their predecessors left a swathe of 
blood behind them, assassinating politicians, businessmen, and security 
officials and terrorizing the population by "knee-capping," or shooting 
in the legs, perceived opponents. Since re-emerging from the shadows in 
1999 they have shot dead two university professors who advised the 
government on labor law reform.
Cracking the Code

Zimmermann is not optimistic about the investigators' chances of 
success. "The very best encryption available today is out of reach of 
the very best cryptanalytic methods that are known in the academic 
world, and it's likely to continue that way," he said.

Sources close to the investigation have suggested that they may even 
have to turn to talented hackers for help in breaking into the seized 
devices. One of the magistrates coordinating the inquiry laughed at 
mention of the idea. "I can't say anything about that," he said.

The technical difficulty in breaking PGP was described by an expert 
witness at a trial in the U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Washington, in 
April 1999. Steven Russelle, a detective with the Portland Police 
Bureau, was asked to explain what he meant when he said it was not 
"computationally feasible" to crack the code. "It means that in terms of 
today's technology and the speed of today's computers, you can't put 
enough computers together to crack a message of the kind that we've 
discussed in any sort of reasonable length of time," he told the court.

Russelle was asked whether he was talking about a couple of years or 
longer. "We're talking about millions of years," he replied.