Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Imagine a new government regulation that restricts the encryption systems allowed by all national ISPs to a specific set of schemes, for which they have a universal or "skeleton" key... and the authority to outright block anything using a different encryption method. This is not only conceivable, it is enforceable, given today's technology.
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The communication between two computer programs goes through the Internet as strings of numbers. Only the sender and the recipient understand what those bytes mean. For instance, in multiplayer games a single packet usually contains only a difference in position and rotation of certain player in the game from one of the previous packets/frames send by the client. It's just a few numbers.
There is no way in the world to be able to identify a string of bytes as encrypted, or not. Nearly everything that goes through ISPs network makes no sense to the ISPs computers. It may be plain and simple communication between two programs, not encrypted in any way, but nothing but those two programs will know what the numbers mean.
Only thing close to that I can see is identifying the stream as compressed - in compressed streams all values of bytes tend to show us with the same frequency... well compressed communication should be indistinguishable from noise. But that's not encrypted. And also nearly everything going through the Net is compressed. Jpg, Gif, Png, Tga formats are usually compressed, all video and audio streams used today have very good compression. Even if you send an uncompressed bmp image, you can count on the router one hop further to compress it in its chip so it takes less bytes to send to the next hop.
The thing you propose would probably make the government block all communication but www (only pure html is left, no java, no flash, nothing good looking, no audio, no video streams) and email.
And then in a few days someone would invent a way of sending everything disguised as emails or www pages, with proper html tags and everything, only different words would mean different bytes of the old communication for the sender and the recipient. If cleverly written, such communication would require reading by human to determine if its really www, or if its encoded signal disguised as www.
In short, from my technical point of view, I don't think it would work.