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  • Hello Internet. We need to talk about locks

  • The physical and the digital.

  • In the physical world, locks aren't as good as you think they are.

  • The lock on your door stops worries, not burglars,

  • As two minutes of searching will reveal.

  • Spend more, get more; but all fail with tools and time enough.

  • That physical locks are bad at locking mostly doesn't matter in normal life,

  • Because burglars are constrained by the physical world.

  • A burglar must cruise the neighborhood, spending their time to pick a target,

  • Which makes a house that looks secure most of the way toward being secure.

  • Each target house can then only be attacked one at a time,

  • And comes with a risk of being physically caught in the act.

  • But digital is different. The constraints of the physical no longer apply.

  • On the Internet, a digital lock must protect you from, not just the neighborhood burglar,

  • But all burglars everywhere. For, on the Internet, there's no such thing as distance.

  • Internet burglars don't crack digital locks personally, they build burglar bots

  • That try millions of combinations just to see what opens.

  • One lock down the street or a country-full on the other side of the worldit's all the same.

  • Actually, other side of the world is better — a dude in East-whatever-landia stealing your identity

  • Has a near-zero chance of getting caught.

  • This is bad news, but thanks to mathematics, digital locks can be made unbreakable.

  • This is encryption — a digital lock that, without the password, cannot be opened.

  • Burglar bots will plough through all the possibilities, but a secure password

  • Will take longer than the heat death of the Universe to guess.

  • No password, no entry. No matter how much of a l33t hacker your mom is

  • Your private files stay private.

  • Which might just be the greatest social good mathematics has done mankind.

  • But it's easy to imagine unbreakable digital locks as bad news.

  • Maximum lazy: ticking time bomb, the location and off-code of which

  • Are locked on the phone of a dead man.

  • Now, were the information on a piece of paper in a safe room, no problem:

  • In the physical world, if you can't crack the lock, then you crack the wall.

  • Society agrees, under this scenario, it's reasonable for police to get in, no matter what it takes.

  • Note: this means real-world locks aren't just physically weak, but also legally weak.

  • We could live in a world with privacy laws that forbade police to break into all locks,

  • no matter how flimsy, but we don't, because that would be dumb.

  • Hmmm...

  • This is where gears turn in government heads.

  • If digital locks are physically invulnerable, maybe they can be made legally vulnerable:

  • To require digital locks be built with a keyhole for which police have the key.

  • Highly secure, top secret, for emergencies only, surely.

  • This legal vulnerability to ban citizens from owning perfect digital locks,

  • To require companies manufacture their devices with keyholes, is an idea

  • That many, many governments are interested in.

  • And governments point out that a warrant which lets police into your house and into your papers

  • Should let police into your phone.

  • If your home is your castle, but the need, pressing enough, the police bring a battering ram.

  • But there's no battering ram to crack open a well-locked phone to comply with a warrant.

  • Not helpfully, anyway.

  • Which is a problem: again, we all ideally want police to crack digital locks sometimes.

  • But at our current level on the tech tree, digital locks that cannot be opened are a thing that exists.

  • And because they are made of math, something a skilled coder can build at home,

  • Trying to ban digital locks for everyone is pretty close to trying to ban an idea.

  • Good luck with that.

  • But even were it possible to successfully ban perfect digital locks in a country, remember:

  • On the Internet, there is no such thing as distance.

  • Even if your government is a Xanadu bureaucracy of the Seraphim Incorruptible,

  • There are demons elsewhere.

  • Unbreakable digital locks are the foundation upon which computing and Internet-ing is built.

  • Banking, buying, blogging, vlogging, gaming, tweeting, beating, meeting

  • All of this is possible because of unbreakable digital locks.

  • They've existed since computers filled rooms, but now, with computers in our pockets,

  • We rely on those locks to protect the content of our livesthe content of our minds.

  • Forced weakness, even with the best of intentions, places everyone in danger.

  • The nature of a keyhole is to be cracked,

  • And the nature of the Internet is to bring demons to the door.

  • No matter how much we might wish it, there is no way to build a digital lock

  • That only angels can open and demons cannot.

  • Anyone saying otherwise is either ignorant of the mathematics,

  • Or less of an angel than they appear.

  • This video has been brought to you in part by Audible.com,

  • where there's more than 180,000 audio books and spoken audio products.

  • Get a free trial today at Audible.com/grey.

  • This time, I'm going to recommend Daemon by Daniel Suarez.

  • I never like to say anything about fictional books, I don't like spoilers,

  • but if you've made it to the end of a video about encryption, this one's for you.

  • Why don't you give it a try as part of your free 30-day trial at Audible.com/grey?

  • And show Audible that you support this channel.

Hello Internet. We need to talk about locks

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