Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
How would it drill through encryption? Using simple end to end public key cryptography (e.g. the https protocol) should make this impossible. It takes massive amounts of computing power to decrypt something encrypted with large enough prime numbers. And monitoring this traffic in real time, I don't think so.
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In all honesty, I don't know how this is being approached, so I don't know how the authorities expect to be able to "break" or "drill into" any encryption system. I suspect maybe they think quantum computing will be their answer... they could easily be counting on some as-yet-undeveloped technology.
They may also be attempting to develop models that "guess" at the contents of an encrypted file, based on some attribute of the encrypted file, even without it being actually decrypted (sort of like systems that "guess" pictures are pornographic by detecting large percentages of flesh-colored pixels... not accurate, but a place to start).
Would there be any other conceivable way to determine the contents of even a piece of a data file (enough to positively identify it) in transit?