Around the same time, researchers discovered that Dropbox stores user files “unencrypted.” Dozens (hundreds?) closed their accounts in protest. They’re my confidential files, they cried, why couldn’t you at least encrypt them?

Many, including some quite tech-savvy folks, were quick to indicate that it would have been so easy to encrypt the data. Not encrypting the data proved Sony and Dropbox’s incompetence, they said.

In my opinion, it’s not quite that simple.

Encryption is easy, it’s true. You can download code that implements military-grade encryption in any programming language in a matter of seconds. So why can’t companies just encrypt the data they host and protect us from hackers?

The core problem is that, to be consumable by human users, data has to be decrypted. So the decryption key has to live somewhere between the data-store and the user’s eyeballs. For security purposes, you’d like the decryption key to be very far from the data-store and very close to the user’s eyeballs. Heck you’d like the decryption key to be *inside* the user’s brain. That’s not (yet) possible. And, in fact, in most cases, it isn’t even practical to have the key all that far from the data-store.

encryption relocates the problem

Sony needs to be able to charge your credit card, which requires your billing address. They probably need to do that whether or not you’re online, since you’re not likely to appreciate being involved in your monthly renewal, each and every month. So, even if they encrypt your credit card number and address, they also need to store the decryption key somewhere on their servers. And since they probably want to serve you an “update your account” page with address pre-filled, that decryption key has to be available to decrypt the data as soon as you click “update my account.” So, if Sony’s web servers need to be able to decrypt your data, and hackers break into Sony’s servers, there’s only so much protection encryption provides.

Meanwhile, Dropbox wants to give you access to your files everywhere. Maybe they could keep your files encrypted on their servers, with encryption keys stored only on your desktop machine? Yes… until you want to access your files over the Web using a friend’s computer. And what if you want to share a file with a friend while they’re not online? Somehow you have to send them the decryption key. Dropbox must now ask its users to manage the sharing of these decryption keys (good luck explaining that to them), or must hold on to the decryption key and manage who gets the key…. which means storing the decryption keys on their servers. If you walk down the usability path far enough – in fact not all that far – it becomes clear that Dropbox probably needs to store the decryption key not too far from the encrypted files themselves. Encryption can’t protect you once you actually mean to decrypt the data.

The features users need often dictate where the decryption key is stored. The more useful the product, the closer the decryption key has to be to the encrypted data. Don’t think of encryption as a magic shield that miraculously distinguishes between good and bad guys. Instead, think of encryption as a mechanism for shrinking the size of the secret (one small encryption key can secure gigabytes of data), thus allowing the easy relocation of the secret to another location. That’s still quite useful, but it’s not nearly as magical as many imply it to be.

what about Firefox Sync, Apple TimeMachine, SpiderOak, Helios, etc.

But but but, you might be thinking, there are systems that store encrypted data and don’t store the decryption key. Firefox Sync. Apple’s TimeMachine backup system. The SpiderOak online backup system. Heck, even my own Helios Voting System encrypts user votes in the browser with no decryption keys stored anywhere except the trustees’ own machines.

It’s true, in some very specific cases, you can build systems where the decryption key is stored only on a user’s desktop machine. Sometimes, you can even build a system where the key is stored nowhere durably; instead it is derived on the fly from the user’s password, used to encrypt/decrypt, then forgotten.

But all of these systems have significant usability downsides (yes, even my voting system). If you only have one machine connected to Firefox Sync, and you lose it, you cannot get your bookmarks and web history back. If you forget your Time Machine or SpiderOak password, and your main hard drive crashes, you cannot recover your data from backup. If you lose your Helios Voting decryption key, you cannot tally your election.

And when I say “you cannot get your data back,” I mean you would need a mathematical breakthrough of significant proportions to get your data back. It’s not happening. Your data is lost. Keep in mind: that’s the whole point of not storing the decryption key. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

and then there’s sharing

I alluded to this issue in the Dropbox description above: what happens when users want to share data with others? If the servers don’t have the decryption key, that means users have to pass the decryption key to one another. Maybe you’re thinking you can use public-key encryption, where each user has a keypair, publishes the public encryption key, and keeps secret the private decryption key? Now we’re back to “you can’t get your data back” if the user loses their private key.

And what about features like Facebook’s newsfeed, where servers process, massage, aggregate, and filter data for users before they even see it? If the server can’t decrypt the data, then how can it help you process the data before you see it?

To be clear: if your web site has social features, it’s very unlikely you can successfully push the decryption keys down to the user. You’re going to need to read the data on your servers. And if your servers need to read the data, then a hacker who breaks into the servers can read the data, too.

so the cryptographer is telling me that encryption is useless?

No, far from it. I’m only saying that encryption with end-user-controlled keys has far fewer applications than most people think. Those applications need to be well-scoped, and they have to accompanied by big bad disclaimers about what happens when you lose your key.

That said, encryption as a means of partitioning power and access on the server-side remains a very powerful tool. If you have to store credit card numbers, it’s best if you build a subsystem whose entire role is to store credit-card numbers encrypted, and process transactions from other parts of your system. If your entire system is compromised, then you’re no better off than if you hadn’t taken those precautions. But, if only part of your system is compromised, encryption may well stop an attacker from gaining access to the most sensitive parts of the system.

You can take this encryption-as-access-control idea very far. An MIT team just published CryptDB, a modified relational database that uses interesting encryption techniques to strongly enforce access control. Note that, if you have the password to log into the database, this encryption isn’t going to hide the data from you: the decryption key is on the server. Still, it’s a very good defense-in-depth approach.

what about this fully homomorphic encryption thing?

OK, so I lied a little bit when I talked about pre-processing data. There is a kind of encryption, called homomorphic encryption, that lets you perform operations on data while it remains encrypted. The last few years have seen epic progress in this field, and it’s quite exciting…. for a cryptographer. These techniques remain extremely impractical for most use cases today, with an overhead factor in the trillions, both for storage and computation time. And, even when they do become more practical, the central decryption key problem remains: forcing users to manage decryption keys is, for the most part, a usability nightmare.

That said, I must admit: homomorphic encryption is actually almost like magic.

the special case of passwords

Passwords are special because, once stored, you never need to read them back out, you only need to check if a password typed by a user matches the one stored on the server. That’s very different than a credit-card number, which does need to be read after it’s stored so the card can be charged every month. So for passwords, we have special techniques. It’s not encryption, because encryption is reversible, and the whole point is that we’d like the system to strongly disallow extraction of user passwords from the data-store. The special tool is a one-way function, such as bcrypt. Take the password, process it using the one-way function, and store only the output. The one-way function is built to be difficult to reverse: you have to try a password to see if it matches. That’s pretty cool stuff, but really it only applies to passwords.

So, if you’re storing passwords, you should absolutely be passing them through a one-way function. You could say you’re “hashing” them, that’s close enough. In fact you probably want to say you’re salting and hashing them. But whatever you do, you’re not “encrypting” your passwords. That’s just silly.

encryption is not a magic bullet

For the most part, encryption isn’t magic. Encryption lets you manage secrets more securely, but if users are involved in the key management, that almost certainly comes at the expense of usability and features. Web services should strongly consider encryption where possible to more strictly manage their internal access controls. But think carefully before embarking on a design that forces users to manage their keys. In many cases, users simply don’t understand that losing the key means losing the data. As my colleague Umesh Shankar says, if you design a car lock so secure that locking yourself out means crushing the car and buying a new one, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Here’s the BrowserID demo at the Mozilla All-Hands last week:

Given my prior work on email-based authentication (EmID, Lightweight Email Signatures, BeamAuth), you might think BrowserID was my brainchild. In fact, it really wasn’t. And, in a testament to the shrinking impact of academic publication venues, none of the BrowserID team had ever heard of my work on email-based authentication before I arrived at Mozila, even though Mozilla folks are quite well versed in the state of the art. But who cares: when I found out about the ongoing work and how we agreed on just about every design principle, I was incredibly excited. And when I realized the fantastic work the team had already done on defining a scaffolding and adoption path for the technology, I was super impressed.

BrowserID started with the Verified Email Protocol, designed by Mike Hanson and Dan Mills, who came up with the approach after extensive exploration of web-based identity approaches over the last two years. It’s a simple idea: users can prove to web sites that they own a particular email address. That’s how they register, and that’s how they log back in the next time they visit the site. BrowserID, the code and site, was initially bootstrapped by Lloyd Hilaiel and Mike Hanson. Shane Tomlinson and I joined the team in June. We now also have an awesome UX design team (Bryan and Andy) and the team continues to grow (yay Austin!)

So, that’s what I’m working on these days: BrowserID and other Identity+UserData efforts at Mozilla. I’m excited to be leading this technical effort. The team is amazing, and we’ve got big aggressive plans to help you control your identity and data on the Web.

You can think of Circles as the actual circles of friends you have. The things that are easy to do in real life, like sharing a fun anecdote with the friends you generally go out with on Saturday nights, are easy to do in Circles. The things that are hard to do in real life, like planning your best friend’s surprise birthday party with all of his close friends but without him, are no easier in Circles: you have to make a new list of “everyone except Bob.” That’s great, because I don’t think our brains have evolved yet to really feel comfortable with a social model that supports all set operations, e.g. this circle minus this other circle. That’s usually how we get caught lying. (I mean the lies everyone tells as part of their normal social interactions.)

The most important point is that this feature shatters the previously universally accepted idea that privacy must change dramatically given social networking. For a few years, Facebook has defined the Laws of Physics of social networking. On Facebook, it’s not possible to show different people a different face. On Facebook, relationships are, for the most part, symmetrical. And so we all believed that this was the inevitable path forward with social networking. We conflated the fact that users wanted to connect online with the constraints that Facebook created, and we assumed users wanted those constraints. We forgot that software engineers define the Laws of Physics of the worlds they create. We weren’t living in the inherent world of social networking. We were living in Facebook’s definition of social networking.

We now know it doesn’t have to be this way. The Laws of Physics in the online world are mutable. Google just busted open a world of possibility. Users will question, now more than ever, why sharing must work the way it does on Facebook, given that Google has shown it can work differently.

It will make Facebook better. Which will make Google better. And so on. We may be witnessing the beginning of a new era of online privacy, a maturation of sorts. This is an incredibly exciting time.

1. the server could get overwhelmed by attackers, preventing voting altogether
2. the server could get hacked and the votes changed surreptitiously
3. the users’ machines could get compromised by a virus, which would then flip votes as it chooses with little or no trace
4. even if somehow we secure the entire digital channel, there’s still the issue of your spouse looking over your shoulder, strongly suggesting you vote a certain way

So, terrifying. And yet, I’m now pretty sure it is inevitable.

What human activity isn’t on the Internet?

Today, we bank online, deposit checks and even pay vendors with our smart phones. We can change our mailing address with the postal service and pay parking tickets with our local governments online. We can shop online, socialize online, and debate with our Presidential candidates online. Newt Gingrich announced his Presidential campaign on Twitter.

Just about everyone now carries an Internet-connected personal device. The Internet is everywhere you want it, and just about everywhere you don’t. People are starting to experience the world through augmented reality, using online maps and satellite overlays matched with your current location. The Internet is only going to become more omnipresent, faster. Within a few years, it’s hard to imagine any human activity that doesn’t involve the Internet.

And yet, somehow, we expect people to still be voting in person, on paper? We can’t even get users to take SSL certificate warnings seriously, but we’re going to convince them that voting is so special it has to be done in person? I don’t think so.

Don’t grab your pitchfork yet

I’m not arguing that this is how it should be. I’m definitely not saying that we can secure online voting just like we can secure online banking. In fact I’ve made many of the original arguments, in my dissertation and on this blog, shooting down the bogus arguments that go something like “hey, we can secure online banking, surely we can secure online voting!” No, we don’t know how to do that.

What I’m saying is that, regardless of the state of online voting security, I think it’s a losing battle to expect voting to remain the only activity we still do in person and on paper. With the Oscars moving to online voting, the Federal Voting Assistance Program making $15M available in grants for activities related to online voting (even if it supposedly doesn’t involve online vote casting), parts of Canada moving to online voting, France considering online voting for its 2M+ expats (more than the margin of victory in the last Presidential election), what you’re hearing is the sound of inevitability.

Enforced Privacy is Dead

There’s another interesting issue, when you think about problem (4): even if we keep voting on paper in person, voting requires enforced privacy: we have to make sure it’s just you in the voting booth, not you plus a coercer. That’s great. Now, how many ballots do you think we’re going to see next year published on Instagram?

We have a deeper problem here due to the now omnipresent Internet. Voluntary privacy is not dead, since users can choose to isolate themselves. But enforced privacy, privacy imposed on the voter, the kind needed to prevent coercion, that’s quite dead. I’m very concerned about what that means for democracy. But again, this is inevitable.

Doing the Best We Can

So, if it’s inevitable, maybe the best we can do is make online voting as secure as possible. We’ll probably have a few disasters, maybe even a few thrown elections. So we’d better start now on the problems we have.

I think we can solve Problem (2) with open-audit, end-to-end voting systems like Helios (but not only Helios, there are others.) I think we can minimize the risk of Problem (1) by moving to a longer voting period (1 week instead of 1 day). I suspect we have to eventually give up on some aspects of (4), whether or not we do online voting, though some technical tricks might make voter coercion a good bit more difficult (it’s never completely impossible). The hardest problem is (3): we have no way of ensuring that people are using trustworthy software that captures their intent properly.

Again, I’m not endorsing online voting for public office. I’m saying it’s inevitable, and it’s time to face that inevitability.

Importance of the User Agent and why I joined Mozilla

This issue of trustworthy user software is a much larger problem than voting. As human activity increasingly moves online, the central question is: what software is truly on the side of the user? How does the user know for sure that the software they’re using is their true agent? There’s only one piece of Internet architecture today that can be the user’s true agent, and that’s the Web browser (which technologists call the User Agent, unsurprisingly.) And, among the web browsers, there’s one that particularly stands out as the ultimate user agent, backed by a company whose mission is focused on the user and only the user.

That’s why I joined Mozilla. Because for voting and beyond, everything people do is online or soon to be online, and users better have an agent on their side. The best agent users can get today is Firefox, and I hope to contribute to making it an even better user agent in the next few years.

[It's worth noting that Mozilla has no intention of getting into the voting business, that's just my personal interest.]

OK, you may now get out your pitchfork.

Last week, a few interesting security tidbits came to light regarding Dropbox, the increasingly popular cloud-based file storage and synchronization service. There’s some interesting discussion of de-duplication techniques which might lead to Oracle attacks, etc., but the most important issue is that, suddenly, everyone’s realizing that Dropbox could, if needed, access your files. Miguel de Icaza wonders if Dropbox is pitching snake oil.

Yes, Dropbox staff can, if needed, access your files. I don’t mean to harp on my fellow technologists but… this has been obvious since day 1, because Dropbox offers a web-based interface to download your files, and even with the latest HTML5 technology, you’d be very hard-pressed to do in-browser file decryption. Let’s say you still don’t buy that, you still think that Dropbox might find a way to encrypt files and decrypt them in your browser. Dropbox also offers a password recovery mechanism, which means they can fully simulate you, the user, including, of course, getting at your files.

In other words, unless you’re ready to lose the convenience of password resets and web-based UI, Dropbox inherently has access to your files. Just like Facebook has access to your entire account, and Google to all of your docs, spreadsheets, etc. The only question is what kinds of internal safeguards do these companies have to prevent abuse by employees. Unless you’ve worked there, it’s hard to know. You could ask Dropbox to do third-party auditing, like Miguel proposes, but in my experience that provides little real security, since you have little way to know what that third-party actually did as part of their auditing (was it just “logic and accuracy” testing?)

The other thing we could ask is for the law to finally recognize that my files stored on Dropbox are no different than my files stored on a hard drive in my basement, from a legal perspective. They’re my property. And accessing them should require the same level of judicial oversight as a warrant to my home. That’s what a group of young MIT techies (myself included) and Harvard lawyers proposed in 1998.

But back to Dropbox. Did they do something wrong? Yes, they did. They exaggerated their security and privacy claims. Just like almost every other cloud data host today. I wish, instead of picking on whichever startup suddenly succeeds, we picked on the industry as a whole. Stop talking about encryption in transit and encryption at rest in the same breath, as if they were the same thing. Stop using “encryption” as a synonym for “secure.” Stop saying “military-grade security.” Start being honest about who can access what.

And we, technologists, should stop with the drama, and not fall prey to the inflated expectations that marketing-heavy security policies have set. The Dropbox weaknesses should have been obvious to technologists from day one. The problem is that all privacy policies and security statements make exaggerated claims using reassuring keywords. Let’s harp on that.

warning signs

Last year, Chris Soghoian and Sid Stamm published a paper, Certified Lies [PDF], which identified the very issue that is at the center of this week’s crisis. Matt Blaze provided, as usual, a fantastic explanation:

A decade ago, I observed that commercial certificate authorities protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns out to be wrong; they don’t even do that much.

A Certificate Authority is a company that your web browser trusts to tell it who is who on the Internet. When you go to https://facebook.com, a Certificate Authority is vouching that, yes, this is indeed Facebook you’re talking to directly over a secure channel.

What Chris and Sid highlighted is an interesting detail of how web browsers have chosen to handle trust: any Certificate Authority can certify any web site. That design decision was reasonable in 1994, when there were only two Certificate Authorities and the world was in a rush to secure web transactions. But it’s not so great now, where a Certificate Authority in Italy can delegate its authority to a small reseller, who can then, in turn, certify any web site, including Facebook and Gmail, using more or less the level of assurance the small reseller sees fit.

what happened

It looks like someone from Iran hacked into one of the small resellers three degrees of delegation away from Comodo to issue to some unknown entity (the Iranian government?) certificates for major web sites, including Google and Microsoft. This gave that entity the power to impersonate those web sites, even over secure connections indicated by your browser padlock icon. It’s important to understand that this is not Google or Microsoft’s fault. They couldn’t do anything about it, nor could they detect this kind of attack. When Comodo discovered the situation, they revoked those certificates… but that didn’t do much good because the revocation protocol does not fail safely: if your web browser can’t contact the revocation server, it assumes the certificate is valid.

a detour via Dawkins, Evolution, and the Giraffe

Richard Dawkins, the world-famous evolutionary biologist, illustrates the truly contrived effects of evolution on a giraffe. The laryngeal nerve, which runs from the brain to the larynx, takes a detour around the heart. In the giraffe, it’s a ludicrous detour: down the animal’s enormous neck, around the heart, and back up the neck again to the larynx, right near where the nerve started to begin with!

If you haven’t seen this before, you really need to spend the 4 minutes to watch it:

In Dawkins’s words:

Over millions of generations, this nerve gradually lengthened, each small step simpler than a major rewiring to a more direct route.

and we’re back

This evolution is, in my opinion, exactly what happened with certificate authorities. At first, with only two certificate authorities, it made sense to keep certificate issuance as simple as possible. With each added certificate authority, it still made no sense to revamp the whole certification process; it made more sense each time to just add a certificate authority to the list. And now we have a giraffe-scale oddity: hundreds of certificate authorities and all of their delegates can certify anyone, and it makes for a very weak system.

This isn’t, in my mind, a failure of software design. It’s just the natural course of evolution, be it biology or software systems. We can and should try to predict how certain designs will evolve, so that we can steer clear of obvious problems. But it’s very unlikely we can predict even a reasonable fraction of these odd evolutions.

the opportunity

So now that we’ve had a crisis, we have an opportunity to do something that Nature simply cannot do: we can explore radically redesigned mechanisms. We can intelligently design trust. But let’s not be surprised, in 15 years, when the wonderful design we outline today has evolved once again into something barely viable.

taking further example from nature?

Nature deals with this problem of evolutionary dead-ends in an interesting way: there isn’t just one type of animal. There are thousands. All different, all evolving under slightly different selection pressures, all interacting with one another. Some go extinct, others take over.

Should we apply this approach to software system design? I think so. Having a rich ecosystem of different components is better. We shouldn’t all use the same web browser. We shouldn’t all use the same trust model. We should allow for niches of feature evolution in this grand ecosystem we call the Web, because we simply don’t know how the ecosystem will evolve. How do we design software systems and standards that way? Now that’s an interesting question…

CSS Squirrel says:

Ben Adida offered the following question as a counter: “Does privacy matter? Cause Opera Mini proxies all of your connections, even SSL, via its servers.” It’s a valid question, especially considering his expertise in the field of privacy and security.

Actually it’s a valid question regardless of my credentials

Not being an expert on how Opera does things, I poked at both Bruce Lawson and Molly Holzschlag, both Opera employees.

Both of them said “If you don’t trust us (Opera), then don’t use the service.”

[...]

So is Opera Mini fast? Yes. Is it secure? Yes.

But that’s not good enough. Trust is not a simple yes/no concept. I trust my dog walker to come into my home, walk my dog, and not go opening up drawers to find my medical records. But I’m not going to leave my medical records out in the open either, cause that’s just asking for trouble. I trust that the Opera browser, installed on my machine, is not phoning home my personal data, because that would be a huge breach of expectation. But if I use Opera Mini and all of my data is being shipped to Opera on every HTTP call, do I trust them never to look at it? Do I trust their security system to be so good that they won’t ever be hacked?

There are degrees of trust. I trust that most reputable installed software won’t phone home with my data. I trust that some data hosts won’t analyze my data too deeply, but certainly many will. And I’m pretty sure many data hosts will get hacked or will leak data unintentionally. So, it’s unreasonable to judge your software publishers and data hosts with the same degree of trust. There isn’t enough of a taboo against data hosts perusing your data. Facebook is mining our data, everyone knows it, and our general reaction is “oh well, what are you gonna do.” But if Microsoft Word scanned your hard drive and shipped your personal info back to Redmond, you’d be looking for a pitchfork right about now.

Opera Mini is misleading because it presents itself as an installable piece of software, when in fact it is almost a data host, and the degree of trust one should consider, when using Opera Mini, is a lot higher than that which is implied by their packaging.

The only nitpick I have, and I point it out because I think it’s significant in Facebook’s case, is that the announcement confuses privacy and security. The first paragraph mentions Data Privacy Day, then the general concept of controlling your data, then transitions to the new security features. But those are quite different.

Security is about stopping the bad guys from stealing your data. Privacy is about controlling the good guys’ handling of your data. (Ron Rivest is said to have phrased this most eloquently, but I can’t find his quotation.)

So, SSL and social re-authentication provide security because they prevent bad guys from seeing your network traffic at the coffee shop or stealing your login. That’s fantastic, but it has little to do with privacy. If Facebook wanted to celebrate Data Privacy Day specifically, they might consider giving users more control over their data on Facebook. Maybe letting users control who gets to tag them in photos (i.e. not my stalker). Or letting users indicate fields by which advertisers cannot target them (i.e. sexual orientation.) Those would be privacy features.

I don’t mean to knock Facebook’s announcement: it’s great. But it’s about security, not privacy.

Fast forward to 2011, and the world is vastly more centralized than it ever was. Almost everyone’s most intimate conversations are held by four companies. And one company knows basically everything about everyone under 25.

How did we get so giddy about the Internet that we didn’t see this coming? We missed an important detail: communication and commerce became vastly more efficient for everyone, including the would-be middle-men, the would be mediators. The Internet enabled economies of scale never before imagined. So while it is possible to host your own email server, it’s a lot easier to use gmail. While it’s possible to host your own web page, post your updates to your blog, subscribe to your friends’ RSS feeds hosted at different blogs, it’s a heck of a lot easier to use Facebook. The Internet put the 1990s middle-men out of business then enabled a new breed of data mediators that provide incredibly valuable services no individual user can dream of performing on their own: apply massively parallel facial recognition to billions of photos to find that one picture of you and your best friend’s grandmother, do deep graph analysis to find your long-lost friends and suggest you connect with them, learn how to filter spam messages so efficiently (thanks to training by billions of messages received on behalf of millions of users) that the spam wars are effectively over.

The Internet has been vastly more empowering to mediators than to individuals. And so we have, in fact, a Control Revolution of a very different nature: one company, namely Facebook, is effectively shaping the future of social interactions, what’s acceptable and what’s frowned upon, what’s private and what’s not.

I say this without any value judgment, purely as an observation. Facebook is making the rules, and when the rules change in Palo Alto, 550 million people follow.

The Failure of Applied Modern Cryptography

Cryptography in the 1980s was about secrecy, military codes, etc. I’m not talking about that.

Modern Cryptography is about individuals achieving a common goal without fully trusting one another. Think of a secret-bid auction. Or an election. Or two people discovering which friends they have in common without revealing the friends they don’t have in common. In all of these cases, people come together to accomplish a common result, but they cannot fully trust one another since their incentives are not perfectly aligned: I want to win the auction by bidding only one dollar more than you, Alice wants her candidate to beat yours, and Bob would like to find out which movie stars you’re friends with even though he knows none.

Modern cryptography teaches us how to accomplish these tasks without ever trusting a third party. That’s hard to imagine if you’re not steeped in the field. But that’s what modern cryptography does: take an interaction that is easily imaginable with the help of a trusted third party that deals with each individual, and replace the trusted third-party with a beautiful mathematical dance that achieves the same end-goal. No centralization of data in one big database, no trusted dealer/counter/connector, just individuals exchanging coded messages in a particular order and obtaining a trustworthy result. Cryptographers call this secure multi-party computation.

Modern Cryptography would, if properly implemented, give us all the functionality of Facebook without the aggregation of everyone’s data in a single data center. And we couldn’t be further from this world if we tried! We are headed for a world of increased data centralization and increased reliance on trusted third parties. Because they’re vastly more efficient, have economies of scale that allow them to provide features we didn’t dream of just a few years ago, and of course because the economic incentives of becoming that trusted third party are staggering.

As a privacy advocate, and again without value judgment, I can’t imagine a more surprising consequence of a technology that was meant to empower the little guy. It is, in a word, shocking.

In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?

Look more carefully at what Google did. They started by supporting H.264 when they had no alternative. Then they introduced a truly free alternative, WebM, which was a major coup. Unlike H.264, this video codec will never hold the Web hostage. Once WebM saw adoption, improvements, and a healthy open-source community, Google was ready to drop H.264, and so they did.

I’m sure that if Google had a true open alternative to Flash, they would follow the exact same pattern. But they don’t. This means they are pragmatists, not free-software purists. They work towards the Open Web, sticking with closed alternatives when they have no other option. I do hope that, when the market tips sufficiently against Flash (and Apple is doing a very good job helping this along, good for them), Google also drops Flash. But there’s a lot more legacy to deal with, so it will take a lot longer.

Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?

I’d say probably yes, but Google is a big company and I’m guessing those decisions are made by different folks. Do you actually expect perfect principled, perfectly timed consistency across the board from such a large business?

YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”? If not, why not?

Maybe. But YouTube dropping H.264 when Apple and Microsoft’s browsers don’t support WebM yet would be a much harsher move, since Safari and IE users would be SOL, and Apple and Microsoft would have to rush to make their browsers compatible with YouTube again while users flock to other browsers. Google Chrome dropping H.264 is a risk Google is taking on, by making their own product less feature-full. That’s a bold move showing they truly believe in the Open Web. Don’t like it? Download another browser. Who’s stopping you?

I suspect Google will gently nudge Apple and Microsoft to support WebM, and only when they do will YouTube switch. That’s the pragmatist, non-confrontational approach.

Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM? If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?

Ummm, dude, it’s Google’s product! What are you so upset about? It’s not as if they have a monopoly like, say, Mobile Safari on smart phones. Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, MLB will have to decide how important the Chrome market is to them. As you say, Flash fallback will still work, so they may simply ignore this. More likely, they may be nudged to dual-encode, if enough users like Chrome and are willing to stick with it. That’s the bet Google is making “our product is so good, we have a chance to make the Web more open with it.”

Who is happy about this?

Anyone who sees the risk of deploying another closed technology to form the basic infrastructure of the Web, and the benefit of having truly open Web infrastructure. You should be happy about this.