The fallback for law enforcement agencies has always been the place where files are stored, and all the best encryption within end-to-end communications will not stop unencrypted files at rest from being examined. But when the user encrypts data into the Cloud and where they hold their own keys, that’s when the nightmare begins for them.
The rise of cybersecurity on the Internet
Let’s pinpoint the start of cybersecurity on the Internet to the 1970s. This saw the rise of the Lucifer cipher and saw banks properly protect their communications. This led to the 56-bit DES encryption method, and which led many to suspect that the size of the key had been crippled due to the demands of law enforcement agencies. But, there was an even greater threat to these agencies evolving: public key encryption.
The rise of public key encryption started in the mid-1970s when Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman first defined a method that allowed us to secure our communications using a key exchange method — the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method. And then, almost a year later, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman presented a way to digitally sign a hash of data with the RSA signature method, and where a server could sign a hash of data with its private key and for this to be verified with an associated public key. For almost the first time, we…
