# Statement on Backdoors

October 5, 2010

The New York Times has recently reported that the current U.S. administration is proposing a bill that would apparently, if passed, require communication systems to facilitate government wiretapping and access to encrypted data.

(login required; username/password pairs available at bugmenot).

Commentary by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Suderman / Reason, Julian Sanchez / Cato Institute.

The core Magic-Folder developers promise never to change Magic-Folder to facilitate government access to data stored or transmitted by it. Even if it were desirable to facilitate such access – which it is not – we believe it would not be technically feasible to do so without severely compromising Magic-Folder’s security against other attackers. There have been many examples in which backdoors intended for use by government have introduced vulnerabilities exploitable by other parties (a notable example being the Greek cellphone eavesdropping scandal in 2004/5). RFCs 1984 and 2804 elaborate on the security case against such backdoors.

Note that since Magic-Folder is open-source software, forks by people other than the current core developers are possible. In that event, we would try to persuade any such forks to adopt a similar policy.

The following Magic-Folder developers agree with this statement:

Jean-Paul Calderone