End-to-end encryption: Best ideas of the century

We all keep secrets. Whether you are trying to protect messages to loved ones, company accounts or vital state intelligence, the technology that allows you peace of mind in our increasingly online world is end-to-end encryption (ETEE).

ETEE means that whoever provides your internet connection, or runs your messenger or video-conference app, cannot see your communications. That’s because they are encrypted on your device, then decrypted on the recipient’s. During transmission, they are a meaningless string of impenetrable gibberish, so no police force, spy agency or criminally minded company insider could demand, blackmail or threaten their way in.

Digital encryption doesn’t depend on promises, but on immutable mathematics. The first useful form of encryption was made possible by the RSA algorithm, publicly described in 1977, which hinges on how difficult it is to find the two prime factors that must be multiplied to create a particular extremely large number. Since then, other algorithms have used all manner of obscure mathematics to create other hard-to-crack encryption codes.

But ETEE’s power is less about exactly how it is implemented and more about how internet secrecy supports democracy and human rights around the world. “There are people in very dangerous parts of the world who literally rely on [encryption] to save their lives,” says Matthew Feeney at UK-based privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch. What’s more, even if you live somewhere you consider to be a liberal democracy, those liberties can be rolled back. “Those who say, ‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’ve done nothing wrong [and I’ve nothing to hide],’ should pick up a history book and proceed with caution,” says Feeney.

Some governments may well hate ETEE because it impedes them from snooping in the same way that postal services and telephone networks allow. Indeed, successive UK governments have sought to ban it, unsuccessfully – most recently, in August last year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an embarrassing U-turn after his government’s demands for Apple to install a backdoor were leaked.

We can’t say for sure that nobody has a way to break through ETEE, because intelligence agencies aren’t in the business of boasting about their abilities, says Feeney. One looming threat is that quantum computers, which harness principles from quantum mechanics such as superposition to solve complex problems that classical computers struggle with, may soon crack the algorithms on which ETEE currently depends. Yet encryption has always been a game of cat-and-mouse, with new mathematical innovations cropping up as previous algorithms are weakened. “Governments are powerful institutions, but they have yet to outlaw the laws of mathematics,” says Feeney.