[Ground-station] How we talk about encryption can hurt us

[Bruce Perens]

We have some serious problems with encryption in Amateur Radio. There is a
continuing push to allow encryption on terrestrial Amateur communications
to accommodate transmission of HIPAA-restricted
personally-identifiable-information (medical data about people who are
being served in an emergency). Currently we just make that data anonymous
and transmit it in the clear, but given the existing big-ticket HIPAA
lawsuits, some of our served agencies would rather encrypt.

The problem for us is that we can't self-police the Amateur bands if
transmissions are encrypted. We must, in fact, give priority to any
encrypted transmission because we have to assume it's an emergency
communication. So, encryption essentially opens the floodgates to
unsupervised private communications on the Amateur bands, which would
displace the honest operators. For the good of Amateur Radio, we must
continue to push back against those who would expand encryption on the ham
bands.

We have a Part 97 permission to encrypt satellite commands because in the
old days AMSAT used exclusive-OR with a constant to conceal their commands
to their very simple satellites which were made out of discrete logic ICs.
Something like digital signature was outside of their capabilities.

We do not strictly need to encrypt satellite commands today, but we have it
to use where that's so important that it justifies the use. Technically, we
could entirely replace encryption with digital signature and messages sent
in the clear. We would be assured that intruders could not sign the message
in a way that would allow them to command the satellite, with the exact
same reliability as if the message was encrypted.

We should not be talking to the public about how important it is that we
can encrypt commands to our satellite. We should indeed be minimizing the
degree that this is necessary at all. By doing otherwise, we feed those who
would like to expand the use of encryption in the Amateur Bands, and
ultimately we do damage to Amateur Radio.

    Thanks

    Bruce

-- 
Bruce Perens - CEO at stealth startup. I'll tell you what it is eventually
:-)
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