Australia passes controversial anti-encryption law

Source: It Pro, 17/12/2018

The `Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment
(Assistance and Access) Bill 2018` was approved by a 46-11
majority earlier this month and could help authorities make faster
arrests, but tech companies are uncertain as to how this will work
without installing backdoors or vulnerabilities in their services.
Failure to comply with the new law will lead to a fine.
Popular apps such as WhatsApp and Signal, which both use end-to-
end encryption, could be forced to cease their service in
Australia.
The Australian government says encrypted communications have
affected around 200 operations in 2018 and that agencies have seen
a 55% increase in encrypted traffic over the year.
However, experts argue that concerns remain as to how companies
will abide by the law. End-to-end encryption, by design, blocks
access to any parties other than the sender and recipient of a
message, and therefore there`s no way of breaking it for one
targetted user. This leaves the likely possibility that a backdoor
in the encryption will have to be made, which, in theory, would
give anyone with knowledge of its existence, or a means to exploit
said backdoor, access to messages.
`This is an extremely bad idea, while the intention is to make a
safe and secure physical society to live in, the major problem is
that our lives are more online than ever and such actions make our
digital society exposed to cybercrime and cyber attacks,` said
Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic.
`This weakens the foundation on what security is built on which is
secure communications and any methods to weaken security opens up
society to cyber crime across borders. This will likely have a
major impact on the Australia economy over time.`
Joshua Lund, a developer for Signal, an end-to-end encrypted
messaging app, said in a blog post that `the end-to-end encrypted
contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by
keys that are entirely inaccessible to us. In most cases now we
don`t even have access to who is messaging whom.`
Carson also criticised the government for the apparent likeness to
states where encrypted communications are banned, such as Saudi
Arabia, Russia and China.
`Any weakening of encryption reduces the security of a country`s
citizens, such a move means that Australia is no different than
China or Saudi Arabia when it comes to citizens` privacy and will
be exposed to citizens` rights abuse without sufficient
independent oversight,` he said.
Whether or not service providers will be able to comply without
risking the security of their platform is yet to be seen, however,
governments across the world, including the UK, continue to
wrestle with technology companies over protecting national
security and maintaining privacy.
The UK has also seen a rise in drug crime which is said to have
been largely facilitated by encrypted messaging apps, such as
Wickr. The billionaire-backed app, which unlike WhatsApp isn`t
linked to an identifying mobile phone number, uses the same
encryption methods as other apps like it, but is particularly
loved by criminals because the messages automatically vanish after
a time period set by the user