Judge, Jury Encryptioner: Exceptional Access with a Fixed Social Cost
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We present Judge, Jury and Encryptioner (JJE) an exceptional access scheme for unlocking devices that does not give unilateral power to any single authority and places final approval to unlock in the hands of peer devices. Our scheme, JJE, distributes maintenance of the protocol across a network of "custodians" such as courts, government agencies, civil rights watchdogs and academic institutions. Unlock requests, however, can only be approved by a randomly selected set of unlock delegates, consisting of other peer devices that must be physically located to gain access. This requires that law enforcement expend both human and monetary resources and pay a "fixed social cost" in order to find and request the participation of law abiding citizens in the unlock process. Compared to other proposed exceptional access schemes, we believe that JJE mitigates the risk of mass surveillance, law enforcement abuse, and vulnerability to unlawful attackers. We aim to raise the bar set by government sponsored "backdoors" which can be used to covertly unlock any device deemed suspicious by law enforcement. While we propose a concrete construction, our primary goal with JJE is to spur discussion on ethical exceptional access schemes that balance privacy of individuals and law enforcement desires. Our scheme transparently reveals the use of exceptional access to device owners, and to the public, in a way that is clear what are the trade offs in security and privacy. In order to unlock devices, governments must pay a fixed social cost that, we believe, can be an effective deterrent to mass surveillance and abuse.
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