Presented by Engine and Charles Koch Institute:
“Most of us use encryption every day, often without realizing it. From talking with loved ones, securing communications between Internet-connected devices, and storing and sharing sensitive health, banking, and business information, we all regularly rely on the security provided by encrypted products and services.
Despite how often we use encryption—and how prominent the encryption debate has become in policy circles—few understand how it actually works. Recently, the conversation about encryption has been framed as a conflict between a select number of high-profile technology companies and law enforcement, but this leaves out the perspective of Internet users and companies of all sizes—especially startups—that rely on encryption and will be impacted by any policy decisions that come out of this conversation.
In the fall of 2019, Engine and the Charles Koch Institute partnered on a three- panel series about “The Nuts and Bolts of Encryption” to educate policymakers and staff on how the technology behind encryption works, how it’s used every day, and where the current debate over encryption stands today.
As a conclusion to this series, this report examines the concepts covered in the panels, beginning with an explanation of the mathematical principles behind encryption and the technical limits of those principles. At its core, encryption relies on the basic idea that it’s very easy to combine two simple things into something complex, but it’s very difficult to take a complex thing and separate it out into its simple components.
This report also examines several recent developments in the policy debate over encryption, including the debate over building backdoors to encrypted content for law enforcement, as well as reports about law enforcement’s current capabilities and impediments to accessing data in criminal investigations, and growing concerns on how encryption may affect efforts to combat the spread of child exploitation material on the Internet.
Through the event series and this report, Engine and the Charles Koch Institute hope to add context and nuance to the debate around encryption, which shouldn’t be reduced to a fight between large technology companies and law enforcement.”
Read the full report here.
