We all keep secrets. Whether you’re trying to protect messages for loved ones, business accounts or vital government intelligence, the technology that gives you peace of mind in our increasingly online world is end-to-end encryption (ETEE).
ETEE means that anyone providing your internet connection or running your messenger or video conferencing application cannot see your communications. This is because they are encrypted on your device and then decrypted on the recipient’s device. They are a nonsensical string of impenetrable gibberish during transmission, so no police, spy agency, or criminal insider could demand, blackmail, or threaten their way in.
Digital encryption does not depend on promises, but on immutable mathematics. The first useful form of encryption was made possible by the RSA algorithm, publicly described in 1977, which depends on how difficult it is to find two prime factors to multiply to produce a particular extremely large number. Since then, other algorithms have used all kinds of obscure math to create other hard-to-break encryption codes.
But the power of ETEE lies not so much in how precisely it is implemented, but rather in how internet secrecy supports democracy and human rights around the world. “There are people in very dangerous parts of the world who literally rely on [encryption] to save their lives,” he says Matthew Feeney in the UK-based Big Brother Watch group. What’s more, even if you live somewhere you consider a liberal democracy, these freedoms can be rolled back. “Those who say, ‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’ve done nothing wrong [and I’ve nothing to hide]”He should pick up a history book and proceed with caution,” says Feeney.
Some governments may hate ETEE because it prevents them from snooping in the same way that postal services and telephone networks allow. Successive UK governments have indeed tried to ban it, but failed – most recently in August last year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an embarrassing U-turn after his government’s demands for Apple to install a backdoor leaked.
We can’t say for sure that no one has a way to crack ETEE because intelligence agencies don’t intend to brag about their capabilities, Feeney says. One looming threat is that quantum computers, which use principles of quantum mechanics such as superposition to solve complex problems that classical computers struggle with, may soon break the algorithms that ETEE currently depends on. Yet encryption has always been a game of cat and mouse, with new mathematical innovations emerging as previous algorithms are weakened. “Governments are powerful institutions, but they have yet to outlaw the laws of mathematics,” says Feeney.
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