Profile of Ray Ozzie, former CTO at Microsoft, and his quest to architect a backdoor for encrypted devices that won't lead to a security or privacy fiasco
Silicon Valley Emotions Are Caught Between Morose and Giddy Department of Computer Science, Columbia University : Ray Ozzie's Proposal: Not a Step Forward Tweets: Tarah M. Wheeler / @tarah : This is cracked, alright. Shall we even get into the complete nightmare of authenticating requests from local, state, & federal authorities? Confirming jurisdiction? Separating relevant data (perhaps GPS) from prurient interests like dating apps? http://www.wired.com/... Matthew Prince / @eastdakota : Disappointing: that @rozzie, who I'd admired, is pitching Congress on dangerous encryption backdoors: https://www.wired.com/... Disgusting: that he's filed a patent in the technology he's pitching: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis .com/ ... #dangerous #shill Kevin Bankston / @kevinbankston : This great piece by Susan Landau (http://t.co/...) serves as a perfect rebuttal to today's piece about Ray Ozzie's #encryption backdoor idea (http://t.co/...). http://twitter.com/... Steven Levy / @stevenlevy : A legendary technologist has concocted what he says is a solution to the crypto wars regarding legal gov access to encrypted data on devices. Will this end the war or heat it more? https://www.wired.com/... Susan Hennessey / @susan_hennessey : If there is any hope for progress on encryption policy, this is it: https://www.wired.com/... Rob Graham / @erratarob : This story is stupid and Ray Ozzie is an idiot. iPhones are already manufactured with an effective secret backdoor key, one they discard after manufacture to prevent abuse. https://www.wired.com/... Kevin Bankston / @kevinbankston : I will (mostly) leave it to the engineers to highlight the serious risks of Ozzie's idea. But on the criticisms of government hacking as an alternative to backdoors: they are valid concerns but ignore the fact that *the government is already doing it.* http://www.wired.com/... 1/2 Kevin Bankston / @kevinbankston : Unless you assume that the government will give up its legal hacking capabilities if a backdoor like this is introduced—which they certainly will not—concerns about such hacking are not an argument in favor of backdoors. (2/2) Eric Geller / @ericgeller : Wired has the story of former Microsoft exec Ray Ozzie's proposed encryption backdoor. And...it's just traditional key escrow. https://www.wired.com/... pic.twitter.com/YqnMWu2Prr Kenn White / @kennwhite : “Apple would send highly trusted employees into the vault where they could use the private key to unlock the PIN [and] then send that no-longer-secret PIN back to the gov't, who can use it to unlock the device.” https://www.wired.com/... Rob Graham / @erratarob : 7/ The summary of backdoors is this: - we have no system secure against thousands of unlock requests per day - we have no system that won't be abused by abusive governments Rob Graham / @erratarob : 2/ The solution isn't purely technical. We already have purely technical backdoors that work fine, such as key recovery in PGP. The purely technical isn't the problem. Rob Graham / @erratarob : 5/ The problem with crypto is that the math has to also fix humans. That's why we use AES, because humans can't expect to carry around one-time-pads. That's why while key escrow sorta works, it's not secure at the sort of scale needed for police backdoors. Eric Geller / @ericgeller : Ozzie is one of the researchers who recently met with the FBI and DOJ on encryption, per the Times last month: https://www.nytimes.com/... The Wired story reveals that he also met with the NSA — and discovered they had developed a similar solution. pic.twitter.com/TnMuxc7yvr Thanks: @gfififi
Context & Ripple Effects
The Wired profile lands two years after Apple refused a court order to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone and framed compliance as building a backdoor — a fight that ended without a legislative mandate. Ozzie, Microsoft's former CTO, is now taking the other side directly to power, having met with the FBI, DOJ, and NSA and pitched Congress on a key-escrow scheme he has patented.
His proposal, dubbed CLEAR, would let OEMs hold private keys and disable a phone once law enforcement accesses it — and within days, [[a:929030|cryptographers flagged hard problems with securing keys at OEMs and reliably killing an accessed phone]], setting the terms of the debate before any bill exists.
First-order effects
- Ozzie's meetings give lawmakers a named, credentialed engineer backing lawful-access legislation, shifting the encryption debate from 'backdoors are impossible' to 'here is a concrete design to attack.'
Second-order effects
- Within a week, an [[a:929147|industry coalition representing Apple, Google, and Facebook publicly condemned law-enforcement backdoors]], converting scattered company positions into a unified front against Ozzie-style escrow.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across cycles: governments keep pressing for access — Five Eyes plus India and Japan renewed the call in 2020 — while experts point to incidents like the reported Salt Typhoon hack of US ISPs' wiretap systems as evidence that 'secure backdoor' systems fail in practice.
The trend: The lawful-access fight is settling into a recurring standoff in which each new escrow proposal from industry veterans meets the same cryptographic objections, while government pressure for backdoors compounds across administrations.