If a country like the UK decided to ban end-to-end encryption, how would they even enforce it? I understand that they could demand big companies like Apple stop providing such services to their customers and withdraw certain apps from the UK App Store. But what’s stopping someone from simply going online and downloading an app like Session? I mean, piracy is banned too, yet you can still download a torrent client and start pirating. What would a ban like this actually prohibit in the end?
Easy. They would block traffic they can’t decrypt.
They would force a root cert to be accepted that they use to decrypt-inspect all encrypted traffic.
Couldn’t be done something like a reversed book encryption? Something that is plain text and perfectly readable but that you can use to decrypt a message?
Wouldn’t binary transfer in base64 be undescifrable as they could be files in a proprietary format?
You’d be surprised at how much an off-the-shelf firewall can see and categorize. A purpose built application that regulates/controls the physical network would have no issue with that type of traffic.
Then I will have my encryption program make the encrypted data look like text/images/whatever…
The network can see who you’re communicating with and either kill that session or pressure either side to allow them access.
Additionally, as a method scales up in usage it becomes more likely a target.