[145960] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Tahoe-LAFS developers' statement on backdoors
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Zooko O'Whielacronx)
Wed Oct 6 10:27:31 2010
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2010 23:31:29 -0600
From: "Zooko O'Whielacronx" <zooko@zooko.com>
To: Cryptography List <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/backdoors.txt
Statement on Backdoors
October 5, 2010
The New York Times has recently reported that the current U.S.
administration is proposing a bill that would apparently, if passed,
require communication systems to facilitate government wiretapping and
access to encrypted data:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html (login required;
username/password pairs available at
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com).
Commentary by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks ), Peter
Suderman / Reason
(http://reason.com/blog/2010/09/27/obama-administration-frustrate ),
Julian Sanchez / Cato Institute
(http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/designing-an-insecure-internet/ ).
The core Tahoe developers promise never to change Tahoe-LAFS to
facilitate government access to data stored or transmitted by it. Even
if it were desirable to facilitate such access=E2=80=94which it is not=E2=
=80=94we
believe it would not be technically feasible to do so without severely
compromising Tahoe-LAFS' security against other attackers. There have
been many examples in which backdoors intended for use by government
have introduced vulnerabilities exploitable by other parties (a
notable example being the Greek cellphone eavesdropping scandal in
2004/5). RFCs 1984 and 2804 elaborate on the security case against
such backdoors.
Note that since Tahoe-LAFS is open-source software, forks by people
other than the current core developers are possible. In that event, we
would try to persuade any such forks to adopt a similar policy.
The following Tahoe-LAFS developers agree with this statement:
David-Sarah Hopwood
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
Brian Warner
Kevan Carstensen
Fr=C3=A9d=C3=A9ric Marti
Jack Lloyd
Fran=C3=A7ois Deppierraz
Yu Xue
Marc Tooley
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