Unpleasant EU move on encryption

[Ross Anderson]

The EU is about to issue a wide-ranging directive to ban unauthorised
decryption of commercial traffic. This is a result of lobbying by
Rupert Murdoch; its stated goal was to make it illegal to sell pirate
TV decoders. The overt justification was the difficulty Murdoch had in
the 1980's and early 90's in closing down pirate pay-TV operators in
Ireland and Germany. That problem has now been fixed but the EU
machine still grinds on towards a directive.

Until very recently, the proposed directive:

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ca-law/COM-97-356.pdf>

just covered pirate decoding devices made available for sale.
However, the DVB lobby wanted it toughened up still further:

<http://www.dvb.org/dvb_news/dvb_pr042.htm>

and they managed to get an amendment quietly put through the European
parliament last month:

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ca-law/anast-report.pdf> 

according to which member states will have to criminalise the
"... provision of information concerning activities and measures
facilitating unauthorized access" (page 8, Amendment 12, c2).

The problem this poses the IT community is threefold.

(1) As the proposed directive also covers electronic shopping, member
states will have to make it an offence to break 40-bit SSL keys (or
even to own a copy of Bruce Schneier's SSL-breaking screensaver :-).
By extending it to cover the provision of information, the amendment
could result in attendees at conferences such as Eurocrypt becoming
criminals. This would make it impossible to hold security conferences
in Europe. It would certainly make my web page illegal (papers such as
`Tamper Resistance - A Cautionary Note' and `Why Cryptosystems Fail'
would be contraband). It might even become an offence for people
supervising computer science here at Cambridge to help undergraduates
with the solution of past exam questions.

(2) Furthermore, the amendment extends the scope of the directive from
payment systems to encompass all technical means whereby access to a
service is made conditional on a prior individual authorisation by the
service provider. So I might be liable to prison for having made my
.netscape/cookies file read-only; my mail filter might also get me
into trouble. (There could be a conflict of laws here as filtering
measures undertaken by European ISPs to comply with EU data protection
and obscenity laws might be illegal under the amended directive.)

(3) If Murdoch gets away with all this - or even with the original,
unamended, directive - then the DTI/GCHQ/NSA people can argue that 40
bit crypto is enough: `if you merely want to protect commercial
transactions, strong laws are more effective that strong algorithms.
People attack systems like pay-TV because the penalties are perceived
to be light or non-existent; they don't attack the (much weaker) funds
transfer systems used by banks as even an attempt gets you jail time.'
This argument didn't cut much ice with Vladimir Levin, but there is a
strong technophobic consitituency in government that believes in legal 
fixes for everything and which will love the spooks' argument.

Anyway, the main effect of this directive will be to put a serious
damper on research, development and the commercial exploitation of
cryptography and systems based on it throughout the whole community
(which the spooks will also like). In the process, it will hand
billions of ECU worth of business to the Americans on a plate. There
is resistance to it on these grounds even in the Commission (the
amendment was faxed to us yesterday by an EU insider who wants to
raise the alarm).

See <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ca-law/> for more details.

Ross