Cryptography and the Intelligence Community The Future of Encryption (2022) / Chapter Skim
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glossary is a useful reference.4 The U.S. Intelligence Community, like intelligence organizations worldwide, uses encryption to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure or modification, and it also has to decrypt encrypted information that it collects as part of its mission.
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Public-Key Encryption While symmetric, or private-key, encryption uses the same key for both encryption and decryption opera tions, public-key or asymmetric encryption uses different but mathematically related pairs of keys for these two functions. Critically, in a public-key system knowledge of the encryption key does not imply knowledge of the corresponding decryption key.
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Figure S.1.3 illustrates the operation of digital signature systems. Public Directory ID PUBLIC KEY ALICE ALICE Public Key ID=A BOB BOB Public Key LIC E A IC L E Pu b li c Ke y ALICE BOB Message Sign Signed Verify Message + Message Signature Signature ALICE Private Key ALICE Public Key FIGURE S.1.3 Digital signatures.
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6 Unlike encryption systems whose origins go back millennia, asymmetric encryption systems apply a public key that can be shared widely to encrypt information, and a separate private key, related to the public key by a hard-to-solve mathematical problem, to decrypt information. Most websites and services on the Internet rely on asymmetric encryption to achieve user authentication and data protection.
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The creation of a large-scale quantum computer might be one such advance. Others include new mathematical attacks on asymmetric encryption, advances that enable efficient computation on encrypted data, and technologies that use quantum properties for encryption.
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Within changeblocs, government has allowed emerging surveillance competitors is thethe norm,chance although some governments and some private companies use Scenario Description new capabilities to "catch up." for processing encrypted data to protect This sensitive scenario positsprocessing. that there are no major breakthroughs regarding a quantum computer, as well as a continued lack of focus on sys tems and security.
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Such a breakthrough would render the public key Scenario encryption Description algorithms currently relied on more easily attacked with much less effort than today, including by conventional computers. In this case, there would be much less need for a quantum computer.
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Fragmented Society and Governance Are Likely to Degrade the Security of Systems and Organizations That Rely on Encryption The breakdown of international cooperation that is likely to follow from fragmented society and governance will have significant effects on the trustworthiness and effectiveness of encryption. The recent Global Trends report produced by the National Intelligence Council, released as the committee finalized its work, depicts scenarios that are almost all fragmented.16 The committee found that distrust among nations and groups, and the breakdown of national alliances, will lead to wider use of cryptography, less sharing of information (and, in particular, less 13 C
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substantive communications content requirements enabled by technological distinctions at national levels, including, for example, banning or discouraging end-to-end encryption (so as to permit government surveillance) , or mandating a variety of governmental access to otherwise encrypted communications (perhaps through required turnover of encryption keys to authorities or insisting on the use of specified encryption schemes)
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would be much less costly and visible than the construction of a quantum computer and could provide significant offensive advantage. Key Findings FINDING 4.2: An improvement in asymmetric cryptanalysis algorithms could have a significant effect on the security of public key encryption algorithms that are in wide use today.
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Computation on encrypted data at scale has the potential to enhance the sharing of intelligence products and enable intelligence activities that better protect individuals' privacy. Key Finding FINDING 2.4: The research community continues to make improvements in the technology of computation on encrypted data.
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