Putin Gives Federal Security Agents Two Weeks To Produce 'Encryption Keys' For The Internet (gawker.com) 296
An anonymous reader writes: The President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has ordered the Federal Security Service (FSB) to produce "encryption keys" to decrypt all data on the internet, and the FSB has two weeks to do it, Meduza reports. The head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, is responsible for accomplishing such a task. "The new 'anti-terrorist' laws require all 'organizers of information distribution' that add 'additional coding' to transmitted electronic messages to provide the FSB with any information necessary to decrypt those messages," reports Meduza. "It's still unclear what information exactly online resources are expected to turn over, given that all data on the internet is encoded, one way or another, and in many instances encryption keys for encrypted information simply don't exist." Some of the details of the executive order include requiring telecom providers and "organizers of information distribution" to store copies of the content of all information they transmit for six months and store the metadata for three years so the Kremlin can access it whenever they want. In order for that to happen, ISPs would need to build new data centers capable of holding all that information and buy imported equipment, all without state subsidies, where they risk going bankrupt. To actually operate the data centers, the Russian government would need to upgrade Russia's outdated electrical grid and cables, which could cost between $30 and $77 billion. What about the "encryption keys?" In addition to storing all the transmitted information, "organizers of information distribution" have to turn over "any information necessary to decrypt those messages." Therefore, "additional coding" will need to be added to all electronic messages to act as instructions for the FSB to "decode" them. Many services and websites don't have "keys" or are fundamentally unsharable, like banks and financial institutions. Nearly all electronic information needs to be "encoded" in some way. Bortnikov has two weeks and the clock starts now. Good luck!
I asked you to kill superman, (Score:5, Funny)
and you can't do that one, simple thing.
Autocrats gotta crat (Score:2)
That's not how any of this works.
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Re:I asked you to kill superman, (Score:4, Funny)
I still feel sorry for the rattlesnake that bit him. Horrible way for a creature to die.
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Superman and Chuck Norris once had a fight, and the loser had to wear his underwear outside his pants
Re:I asked you to kill superman, (Score:4, Insightful)
Superman? This is the Internet. It's more like announcing that all cats in Russia will be herded into a single pen located at the FSB. They don't have the pen built, they don't know where all the cats are or how many of them there are, and the cats are unlikely to be cooperative.
Get it done in 2 weeks.
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Might as well order them to produce cold fusion (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no such thing as keys that would decrypt "all data on the internet", which hopefully everyone here already knows. Empty, dead, pointless parody of law. The war on encryption is doomed to fail
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Re:Might as well order them to produce cold fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if all ISPs in Russia are required to do this, it will be done.
I'm thinking that this will really reduce foreign investment in Russia. And business & the economy will take a direct hit over the next several years.
Re:Might as well order them to produce cold fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Might as well order them to produce cold fusio (Score:3)
Exactly. It is very difficult to get populist support when things are going well, much easier to blame others and rally the troops when things aren't perfect.
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he certainly is trying his damndest to reinstate the Soviet state.
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Well, the Soviet state without all the lies about it being "for the masses."
I wonder if President Obama still thinks Mitt Romney was wrong about Putin...
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Perhaps any private key stores in the hands of ISPs or other Russian services may end up in the Russian government's hands. But what about all the self-signed communications, or communications signed by keys external to Russia?
One wonders whether this is just an attempt at a bluff, as in "We'll find your secret communications, Comrade!" or whether Putin and his advisers are is ignorant of the underlying mathematics and technology as so many governments in the West are? On the face of it, whoever wrote this
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Perhaps any private key stores in the hands of ISPs or other Russian services may end up in the Russian government's hands. But what about all the self-signed communications, or communications signed by keys external to Russia?
One wonders whether this is just an attempt at a bluff, as in "We'll find your secret communications, Comrade!" or whether Putin and his advisers are is ignorant of the underlying mathematics and technology as so many governments in the West are? On the face of it, whoever wrote this law has absolutely no fucking idea how encryption works on the Internet.
I would bet the latter.
It's actually kind of refreshing to see a leader of a (former) SuperPower that is even more ignorant of technology than our own homegrown Overlords in the U.S.
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It's inconceivable that Russian Intelligence is ignorant of the realities of encryption or of the internets' infrastructure. My assumption is this is concrete message to anybody in the space that they are expected to do whatever they can, meaning to pro-actively implement the appropriate infrastructural back doors into their systems to allow for data exposure upon demand. It doesn't have to be very well defined to change the status quo. Corporate Russia will figure out how to orient itself into compliance w
Re:Might as well order them to produce cold fusion (Score:4, Funny)
We'll have the best stupid leaders! The Best! You'll never believe how stupid our leaders will be. You'll ask if we can get leaders any stupider and I'll say No because we'll have the stupidest leaders ever!
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Considering that essentially all of the politicians in Russia have fake PhDs ( http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com] ) I would say that it's fairly likely that they have no idea how the Internet or mathematics or economics or really anything works...
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It isn't important that it be done, it is important that it is said to be done. It will happen like everything else in Russia, half-assed and boneheaded. That's not what Tsar Putin will hear though. He will hear, "'tis a wonder and increaseth growth, verily the West will cower to our enlarged secure internet". The Tsar will declare to the Russian people they are now even better protected than they were before from Western conspiracies designed to lay waste the Soviet...errr...Russian people.
For once I'd lik
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He's getting old and will soon be irrelevant. Given the silly state of Russian succession politics, a power vacuum will form and there will be turmoil and generally unnecessary stupidness for several years. What a waste; that country has huge potential, but they can't figure out how to unleash it.
Perhaps Putin will have a nice Cerebral Hemorrhage. That seemed to be the typical Russian Retirement Method back in the Cold War days.
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It's neither empty, dead, nor pointless. It justifies any and all warantless exploration of communication from 2 weeks until eternity, and provides a legal means for any telecoms operator to be required to install anything that the government instructs, whenever. And it's pretext to outlaw new encryption methods.
Re:Might as well order them to produce cold fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Empty, dead, pointless parody of law.
I might feel better about that if my own government and those of many of our Western allies weren't trying to do essentially the same thing, also with a perfectly straight face.
Re: Might as well order them to produce cold fusio (Score:3)
There is a huge difference though. He issued a pointless decree, the west actually has a framework in place to DO it...
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There is no such thing as keys that would decrypt "all data on the internet", which hopefully everyone here already knows. Empty, dead, pointless parody of law. The war on encryption is doomed to fail
Are you sure?:
0000000 90e4 781a 3c0a f245 1c28 4910 6394 1c84
0000020 8ce8 da59 fffe 5993 4499 19c6 5e3e 405f
0000040 c2d8 83bf f249 e9be 3b4a 68d3 2355 b2ce
0000060 4a6e 17a4 b1d7 92a7 0503 0e1e 1c22 6215
0000100 7709 e0ea 5b76 382a e59f 4a00 d9fd 0e85
0000120 41e1 9080 7f36 01c4 449f b7c4 b31e 2f38
0000140 953a a04f f4df 3f7b b47f 4097
Sounds like a personal thing to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Putin knows full well that this task is not achievable, but wants to use it to shove someone out of their job in disgrace. I guess we'll find out who that is soon enough.
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After they fail, their next step is to say "See, this cannot be done", And Ban all cryptography.
Re:Sounds like a personal thing to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
What was the old saying in Tsarist Russia? Something like, "If 5 people get together to plot revolution, what you have is one revolutionary and four police informants." We are not talking about a country that has ever really been free since the earliest Viking settlements in places like Moscow. Hundreds of years of autocracy or oligarchy. What else would they produce politically but Putin and an encryption ban?
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This sort of thing backfired on Germany before. After all, one Adolf Hitler was employed by the German security services to infiltrate a certain of far right extremists, and the rest, shall we say, was history.
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Banning encryption is useless, unless you plan to ban ALL information transmission. As long as you allow me to transport any information, I can easily find a way to transmit hidden messages.
And trust me, Russians are GREAT at that. They have a long, long history of censorship and circumventing it.
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I think Putin knows full well that this task is not achievable, but wants to use it to shove someone out of their job in disgrace. I guess we'll find out who that is soon enough.
Oh, like he NEEDS an excuse?
No, sorry. I think Putin really is that ignorant and megalomaniacal.
2 weeks later (Score:5, Funny)
Contents of Official FSB Decryption kit:
Wrench
One way train ticket to Siberia
Re:2 weeks later (Score:4, Informative)
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Which is the "official and legal" way to obtain access to encrypted information in the US. The "wrench" is called a "subpoena" or a "warrant" issued by a judge for probable cause, combined with an unbounded eternity in jail for contempt of court until you cough up the keys. Yes, you can be in prison for life without even having a trial for ongoing contempt of court. Every day is a new offense and another day in jail.
I'm even reasonably comfortable with that. At least there is some sort of due process wi
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Mother Russia always been good with low tech answer to high tech problem. MIR kept in orbit long time with duct tape. When was available. Often just kept together by underpants. When was available.
Putin is not stupid (Score:3)
So why is he pretending to be stupid?
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So why is he pretending to be stupid?
Perhaps he's been in power too long and it's beginning to mess with his sanity like it happened to many other dictators before him?
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So why is he pretending to be stupid?
Perhaps he's been in power too long and it's beginning to mess with his sanity like it happened to many other dictators before him?
Perhaps it's just the first symptoms of Polonium poisoning [wikipedia.org].
We can only hope.
Re:Putin is not stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Many reasons:
-Trying to oust Bortnikov, for when he inevitably fails Putin has a reason to toss him or large parts of the FSB out.
-Justification for giving them (FSB) more funding or more powers to accomplish these goals (as a result of inability to accomplish goals with current resources).
-It could also be to create a large effort in the FSB with the rationale that the FSB will have no choice to resort to heavy handed tactics, which will them be targeted at institutions and/or ISP's that through "random coincidence" have slighted Putin somehow.
But yes, Putin is very smart--and also very shrewd.
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Sorry, but you're 100% wrong. Mainstream news media have unfailingly supported the corporate viewpoint for years. The trend started when TV news brought the Vietnam War into America's living rooms, and the so-called "Silent Majority" turned on the corporate money machine and forced an end to that war. That would not be allowed to happen again. Concentration of ownership ensued, and we now have only a handful of major voices left...and they're all singing from the same songbook.
Anybody who believes ground
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Look at everything he does as a means to an end. Don't assume this is about encryption keys.
typical gawker ignorance and misinformation (Score:2, Insightful)
not that putin is a good guy. nor is his new law, and his orders based on that, good. he and it are evil things. though law at least is merely an attempt to give russian government same powers as usa government. definition of evil.
anyway this summary and gawker article exaggerate to absurdity in order to vilify russians in every way possible, and seems to assume total ignorance on the part of readers. (to be expected from gawker but not from /.).
there are much more knowledgeable and rational critiques of
Re:typical gawker ignorance and misinformation (Score:5, Funny)
Russia isn't evil. Russians aren't evil. Putin most certainly is. He's like a Russian Donald Trump.
Trump is America's answer to Putin. America cannot be outdone by Russia, so Trump is our strategy to out-Putin Putin.
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Trump is America's answer to Putin. America cannot be outdone by Russia, so Trump is our strategy to out-Putin Putin.
Dear God please no pictures of Trump with his shirt off.
All keys... (Score:5, Informative)
for (i=0; i0xffffffffffffffff; i++)
printf("%16x\n",i);
printf("ffffffffffffffff");
or something along those lines. That'll produce all 128bit keys. Just don't ask me to match each key with each piece of data...
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Just don't ask me to match each key with each piece of data...
You'll get an extra week for that.
Re:All keys... (Score:4, Funny)
Not in 2 weeks, that's for sure.
Guess its a Universal Trait (Score:2)
Putin isn't stupid (Score:2)
Especially not THAT stupid.
I guess that back at his own KGB/FSB days, that poor Bortnikov guy tried to hit on Putin's girlfriend or something like that... In twio weeks he will see what that got him....
One word: terrorism (Score:2, Insightful)
Terrorism is king. It trumps privacy or freedom.
The west has been using this justification for many years now and it would seem that Russia too last learned that to justify anything Orwellian, all you need to say is "because terrorism." Case closed.
Keyless Encryption (Score:2)
and in many instances encryption keys for encrypted information simply don't exist
Ahh keyless encryption: for when you really don't care to ever get the data back.
Re:Keyless Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
and in many instances encryption keys for encrypted information simply don't exist
Ahh keyless encryption: for when you really don't care to ever get the data back.
Many keys are ephemeral. Once the information has been received and acknowledged, both parties discard their keys. If you intercept one of these messages, no one will ever have a way of decrypting it. The only way to get the information is to double back and beat it out of one of them.
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and in many instances encryption keys for encrypted information simply don't exist
Ahh keyless encryption: for when you really don't care to ever get the data back.
Many keys are ephemeral. Once the information has been received and acknowledged, both parties discard their keys. If you intercept one of these messages, no one will ever have a way of decrypting it. The only way to get the information is to double back and beat it out of one of them.
Sure, you can use TLS for instance and get a new key for each transaction. There is still a key, however and one could intercept a TLS key, for instance, by way of a man in the middle attack.
Lol, and I want.... (Score:2)
"The President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has ordered the Federal Security Service (FSB) to produce "encryption keys" to decrypt all data on the internet, and the FSB has two weeks to do it"
Lol, and I also want a magic box that produces an endless supply of tasty, tasty unicorn-scented donuts, the kind with sprinkles on top. And it has to run forever without any electricity or ingredients, too. And I want a big red yacht that can fly to orbit, has artificial gravity, and a tennis court the s
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Possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibilities in order of likelihood
1) This reporting is wildly inaccurate, and misses key details, like for example only part of the implantation must be completed in two weeks or similar.
2) Putin is doing this for political cover, he has intelligence there is going to be another terror attack in Russia or one of its surrogates. The intel is not good enough to prevent it, but he wants to look like he is 'doing something'. The argument will be if only people had got out of his way an let him do this sooner the tragedy would have been avoided. It both bolsters his strongman persona and gives an excuse to expanding executive power.
3) Putin is created a legal excuse to punish people who are otherwise political enemies, noncompliance with this new law will provide a legal cover an a veneer of legitimacy.
4) Putin is perfectly aware this is impossible but it will produce a flurry of activity from people who will be trying desperately to save the careers by at least appearing to comply in good faith, in hopes others will take the blame for the obvious eventual failure. Putin plans to utilize all this activity as a distraction to enable some other covert objective to be completed.
5) Putin has totally left the reservation.
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Possibilities in order of likelihood
1) This reporting is wildly inaccurate, and misses key details, like for example only part of the implantation must be completed in two weeks or similar.
Best one of those I saw recently said "MP threatens to cut off Gove's penis", turned out what had actually happened was when asked what game of thrones character he resembled the MP responded with the name of a guy in it who apparently had his cut off or something.
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1) Part or whole, this is prime quality horse shit. The idea alone speaks volumes about how much li'l Vova knows about the internet in general and encryption in particular.
2) "Doing something" could be done vastly differently in Russia. We're talking about a country where you can have soldiers parade up and down some roads on a whim, it's not like you have to do such petty grandstanding, you can do some real grandstanding! That is also a lot more powerful in the strongman approach. Just think what he could
Well (Score:3)
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512 bit implies public/private key encryption, and bad encryption at that.
For public/private key encryption you don't need to list every number, just every prime, and the list of every prime multiplied by every other prime.
To do this properly, head to 4096 bits, though.
Lies (Score:5, Informative)
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Checked all your posts. 99.9% of them (if I was conspiracy minded) seem like posts from one of Putins 'Internet commenter shills', where they try to insult and degrade any non-Putin owned Russian companies.
Re:Lies (Score:4, Interesting)
Pallet of Vodka anyone?? (Score:2)
i think somebody is going to be drinking vodka like water for the next 10 days.
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupidCauseTheSubjectIsTFA (Score:2)
It's called "openssl" and it can generate any encryption key ever used in the past and in the future.
It may take some time though.
There is only one answer... (Score:2)
Interney keys, Putin Mr [youtube.com]
Non sequitur (Score:2)
Reasoning behind this is VERY simple (Score:3, Insightful)
ISPs fail to have this system in place within 14days. Putin "takes over" all internet providers, claiming full share ownership of them.
See - Russian Oil, coal, gas, solar, farms, manufacturing, Processor Manufacturer (MCST) etc. All now 100% owned by Putin.
just like the USSR (Score:2)
just like the USSR what next the missile key?
Too Many Secrets... (Score:2)
All he needs is Janik's little black box. It looks like a telephone answering machine...
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I was WONDERING when Setec Astronomy would pop up in this thread. . . .
You keep using that word (Score:2)
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Is Veddy Bad Day (Score:2)
in soviet russia we unencrypt you! (Score:2)
in soviet russia we unencrypt you!
Delay, then make it up (Score:3)
"It will be ready any day now" for about 6 months,
"Ready for testing" Followed by 6 months of failures
"Ready" With some sample data.
"Make stuff up" from then on
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That's like back when Soviet Russia was trying to turn shit into butter. They eventually claimed a 50% success: You could spread it on bread just fine, but the taste...
I hope somebody has fairy god parents. (Score:2)
I'm just gonna leave this here:
https://65.media.tumblr.com/8e... [tumblr.com]
And go... (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
2 weeks... (Score:3)
Is that enough time to pack and get a travel visa to ... doesn't matter, just OUT OF HERE!
Encryption Key For The Internet (Score:2)
I'll save Pution some time and post the encryption key to the Internet right here. Ready?
1...
2...
3...
4...
5...
So the encryption key to the Internet is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to change the combination on my luggage for completely unrelated reasons.
There isn't going to be an Internet (Score:3)
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Yes smells like propaganda...
Re:Mercy-flush (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe because if Putin is assassinated, it only empowers someone even worse to stroll up and say "see, this is why we need to be even stronger and more secure". Maybe. I'm not an expert.
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Name one occasion in the recent past where a politician has been replaced by a better one.
The main reason political assassination has gone out of habit is simply that the figure head is either fully replaceable or that whatever is sitting behind the throne waiting to ascend is even worse than what's sitting there now.
Nobody thinks he's a good czar. It's just that everyone is afraid of what could come after.
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Evil is dusty?
Re:Mercy-flush (Score:4, Interesting)
There were a lot of assassination attempts at him. Fortunately none of the succeeded. Just imagine what could have happened if a capable military strategist had that army, that technology and that industrial capacity at his disposal. We're talking about an army that could wage a war against Russia + USA for roughly 4 years, and an industry that could supply that war under stress of bombing for the same period. The very last thing you'd want in the mix is someone actually able to handle that power.
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This is happening more and more here on Slashdot. Entire conversations are being hidden from view, even when browsing at -1 (which I always do). If you are logged in when you post, you can still see that comment and its children if you look at your posting history, but it will be gone from the main comments section of the article.
I'm not surprised, however, as the new owners are just here to actually and finally destroy the site due to it's unwavering support for free and anonymous speech and the only mod
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How do you decrypt information that is encrypted not only point to point but beyond that? If I dump a blob on a Russian server and you cannot read it, is it encrypted or do you just not know the proper protocol?
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Shhh, you don't anger Vova, you don't want him to throw a tantrum...