There are some cases involving plausible deniability where game theory tells you should beat the person until dead even if they give up their keys, since there might be more.
About 10 years ago, I read a paper that suggested mitigating a rubber hose attack by priming your sys admins with subconscious biases. I think this may have been it: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity12/sec12-final25.pdf
Essentially you turn your user to be an LLM for a nonsense language. You train them by having them read nonsense text. You then test them by giving them a sequence of text to complete and record how quickly and accurately they respond. Repeat until the accuracy is at an acceptable level.
Even if an attacker kidnaps the user and sends in a body double, with your user’s id, security key, and means of biometric identification, they will still not succeed. Your user cannot teach their doppelganger the pattern and if the attacker tries to get the user on a video call, the added lag of the user reading the prompt and dictating the response should introduce a detectable amount of lag.
The only remaining avenue the attacker has is, after dumping the body of the original user, kidnap the family of another user and force that user to carry out the attack. The paper does not bother to cover this scenario, since the mitigation is obvious: your user conditioning should include a second module teaching users to value the security of your corporate assets above the lives of their loved ones.
Essentially you turn your user to be an LLM for a nonsense language. You train them by having them read nonsense text.
Did you forget the word “teach”? Or even the concept?
I am well aware of learning, but people tend to learn by comprehension and understanding. Completing phrases without understanding the language (or the concept of language) is the realm of LLM and Scrabble players.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_player)
Like this madman
“In 2015, despite not speaking French, Richards won the French World Scrabble Championships, after reportedly spending nine weeks studying the French dictionary. He won it again in 2018, and multiple duplicate titles from 2016.”
One possible countermeasure being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
As referred in other comment, the counter counter is to just keep beating to get further keys/hidden data.
Inflation.
I don’t think an inflatable wrench would work very well.
Now I’m just imaging a judge trying to get order in the court room with an inflatable mallet
Where is this from? I don’t think exposing the key breaks most crypto algorithms, it should still be doing its job.
The private key, or a symmetric key would break the algorithm. It’s kind of the point that a person having those can read it. The public key is the one you can show people.
Doesn’t break the algorithm though, you would just have the key and then can use the algorithm (that still works!) to decrypt data.
Also you’re talking about one class of cryptography, the concept of key knowledge varies between algorithms.
My point is an attacker having knowledge of the key is a compromise, not a successful break of the algorithm…
“the attacker beat my ass until I gave them the key”, doesn’t mean people should stop using AES or even RSA, for example.
The purpose is to access the data. This is a bypass attack, rather than a mathematical one. It helps to remember that encryption is rarely used in the abstract. It is used as part of real world security.
There are actually methods to defend against it. The most effective is a “duress key”. This is the key you give up under duress. It will decrypt an alternative version of the file/drive, as well as potentially triggering additional safeguards. The key point is the attacker won’t know if they have the real files, and there is nothing of interest, or dummy ones.
I appreciate the explaination, that’s a cool scheme, but what I saying is the human leaking the key is not the fault of the algorithm.
Everyone and everything is, on a very pedantic level, weak to getting their ass beat lol
That doesn’t make it crypt analysis
An encryption scheme is only as strong as its weakest link. In academic terms, only the algorithm really matters. In the real world however, implementation is as important.
The human element is an element that has to be considered. Rubber hose cryptanalysis is a tongue and cheek way of acknowledging that. It also matters since some algorithms are better at assisting here. E.g. 1 time key Vs passwords.
