Social Media and the Encryption Challenge

Encryption is the new challenge facing law enforcement not just in India but around the world. Social media apps such as WhatsApp and Viber have gone ahead and provided end-to-end encryption (E2EE) communications to users. Law enforcement officials have said that this makes it impossible for them to engage in legitimate monitoring of communications by terrorists and criminals.

Encryption is not a new technology and forms the backbone of secure communications and data transmissions over the Internet. Without encryption, financial transactions and secure data transmission would be impossible. Efforts by social media companies to encrypt their data is a more recent phenomenon and is a direct fall-out of the mid-2013 Snowden revelations.

Types of Encryption

• In social media apps, using E2EE encryption means that only the sender and receiver can read the encrypted data because the key to decrypt the data lies only with the end user. No other entities including the service provider has the capacity to decrypt the data even though the data travels through their servers.
• In general, there are two kinds of encryption. In Symmetric Encryption or Secret Key encryption, the same key called the secret key is used to encrypt and decrypt the data or message.
• It is a very simple method of encryption but the challenge is to preserve the secret key from unintended recipients. If A wants to send a message to B, A encrypts the data using a secret key and shares the key with B to decrypt and read the message.
• In Asymmetric Encryption or Public Key Encryption, different keys are used to encrypt and decrypt the data or message. It is a complex but efficient method of encryption. A public key known to all is used to encrypt the message and a private key, only available with the recipient, is used to decrypt the message. Public key is like finding a telephone number in a directory where each person has his own public key.