Survey into encryption products concludes that national regulations calling for backdoors cannot have the desired effect

A recently published survey looking into 865 hardware or software products incorporation encryption, from 55 country, points out to the fact that, because of the wide availability of such products, any mandatory backdoors required for by law enforcement authorities ‘will be ineffective’. This is because such backdoors are easy to be evaded, given that the market place for encryption products is international and criminals can switch to products that are not covered by national legislation in a certain jurisdiction. Instead, any national law mandating backdoors will affect the ‘innocent users of those products’, leave people in the respective country ‘vulnerable to abuse of those backdoors by cybercriminals and other governments’.