Seny Kamara Comments On A Proposed Signing Key Solution In The Wake Of The Apple/FBI Controversy
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 14, 2016
Weeks after Apple's refusal to unlock the iPhone of an accused perpetrator of the 2015 San Bernardino massacre, public debate about surveillance, privacy, and encryption continues. As solutions are proposed, faculty members from Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) have been repeatedly asked for comment. This time, MIT Technology Review has sought out Associate Professor Seny Kamara, who shares his thoughts on a "decentralized witness cosigning" model from Bryan Ford of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which requires virtual signatures from thousands of widely-distributed signing key holders as an additional security measure.
Seny likes the solution's technical merits but isn't sure of the reception it may find: "There remains a question as to whether the big companies would be comfortable having their software update mechanisms be dependent on third parties."
The full article is available here.
For more information, please click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.