SSB Awareness Series: Law of Encryption - Part 1

The government shocked everyone with a new Draft policy on the Internet usage. According to the draft on new encryption policy the government will have access to all the encrypted information, including personal emails, messages or even data stored on a private business server. Moreover, according to the policy the government wants the users to store all the encrypted communication for at least 90 days and make it available to security agencies, if required, in text form. 

It also wants everyone to hand over their encryption keys to the government. Moreover, the government has to be provided the data from the service providers as and when demanded.The draft was formulated by an expert group set up by the Department of Electronics and Information technology (DeitY) under the sections 84 A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Almost all of the messaging services and email including watsapp, hike, gmail use encryption to communicate the message the draft will cover all instant messages and emails.

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Technological point of view:

In order to understand why a law was being made to save the messages of social networking sites such as facebook and personal messaging apps such as watsapp one needs to understand the process used by these applications to send the messages. All these applications use encryption in order to send the messages. Encryption is basically the process to convert the data or Plain Text in this case, into a cipher or code, in order to avoid any unauthorized access. Hence, the messages which are being sent are in the form of codes and stored in a server in other countries and when they come to our mobile they are decrypted to be seen as the way we see them namely Plain Text.

Why does the government want to snoop in to people’s personal messages?

Recently, many criminal activities have taken place in India due to the fact that the criminals and terrorists in the country have been using these modes of mass communication for corrupting the minds of many people. Also, many videos are being used to promote wrong feeling among various communities in order to promote violence.  Also these messages are also used to spread viruses among the masses to corrupt the communication in the country.

Hence, the security organizations like IB need to snoop in to messages of the people in order to find out the culprit. Moreover, whenever these organizations get any information on any kind of terrorist activity being planned they immediately need to take action and collect information from every source so as to catch the culprit before the crime takes place. Hence, they need to decrypt the data which is being sent across these applications in order to convert it to a meaningful information or Plain Text. But the problem arises since most of the encrypted information is kept on servers that are not present in the county instead they are present in some foreign country. 

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Hence, security organizations need to request these organizations so as to have the decrypted form of the information. This takes much of the time of the government due to legal process or requests which must be made with the private partners or the government of that nation to access such personal information. Moreover, it takes huge cost to access the information. Moreover, the government does not have a huge decrypting mechanism in order to decrypt all the messages which they want to see hence, they are not able to get the information they need in a fast and accurate manner.
there is lot more in this part , where we will see the implications and the impact on us. Keep reading for more info.

Click here for SSB Awareness Series: Law of Encryption - Part 2

About the Author:  Pranav Nikam is an Electrical and Electronics engineer who is working in a renowned MNC in Chennai. He likes to work out in gym, do photography and play badminton. Through his articles he wants to spread awareness among other defence aspirants.