A New Era of Attacks on Encryption Is Starting to Heat Up

In the past ten years, Encrypted communication has become the norm for billions of people. Daily, signalIMESSAGE and WhatsApp keep billions of messages, photos, videos and calls privately using use End-to-end encryption By default, zoom, discord and various other services have options to enable protection. But despite the mainstream increase in technology ,, long -term threats To weaken the encryption, continue to piling up.

In the past few months, there has been an increase in government and law enforcement efforts that would effectively undermine the encryption, say that the lawyers and experts in privacy and experts have recently been the up-and-coming threats to the “bluntest” and the most aggressive of those recently. Officials in Great Britain, France and Sweden have taken all steps since the beginning of 2025 that can undermine or eliminate the protection of end-to-end encryption, which contributes to a multi-year plan of the European Union to increase them Scan private chats And Indian efforts that could damage encryption.

These recent attacks on encryption have recently been considered secret services and law enforcement officers in the United States Returning of years of setting of the order And now recommend that people use encrypted communication platforms whenever they can. The drastic shift of the attitude followed the Salz-Typhoon hacker group of the widespread violation supported by China Main US telecommunicationsAnd when the second Trump government increases the potential monitoring of millions of undocumented migrants in the United States. At the same time, the administration has burdened itself long -standing, decisive international intelligence sharing Agreements and partnerships.

“The trend is bleak,” says Carmela Troncoso, a long-time researcher for privacy and cryptography and scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Germany. “We see these new guidelines as mushrooms that try to undermine the encryption.”

The end-to-end encryption is designed in such a way that only the sender and the recipient of news have access to their content-good governments, technology companies and telecommunications providers cannot do what people say. These data protection and security guarantees have made Encryption a goal for Law enforcement authorities and governments for decadesBecause officials claim that the protection makes it unaffordable Examination of urgent threats such as sexual abuse of children and terrorism.

As a result, governments around the world have often proposed technical mechanisms to avoid encryption and enable access to studies. However, cryptographers and technologists have repeated and definitely warned that everyone Back door Created to access end-to-end encryption communication could be Exploited by hackers or authoritarian governments, which endangers the security of everyone. In addition, it is likely that criminals will find their way to continue using homemade encryption instruments to hide their news, which means that back doors in mainstream products would be successful in order to undermine the protection for the public without eliminating the use by poor actors.

On the whole, the latest encryption threats have been raised in three forms, says Namrata Maheshwari, the encryption policy that now leads to international non -profit access. First, there are those in which governments or law enforcement authorities request the backtors to be integrated into encrypted platforms in order to obtain “lawful access” to content. At the end of February, for example Apple pulled The encrypted iCloud -Backup system, named Extended data protectionFrom use in Great Britain according to the legislators of the country Reports Click on the Cupertino company with a secret order in which Apple is provided to access to encrypted files. Apple would have created a back door for this. The order, which was criticized by the Trump government, is to be challenged in A Secret court hearing on March 14th.