According to the Austrian radio, the EU member states intend to ban the encryption of messenger services. The decision is to be passed in November. Thus, operators of such services would be forced to build so-called back doors in their program code. This would mean that the authorities would be able to read encrypted messages. The whole thing becomes particularly critical, however, since the aforementioned decision does not speak of “competent authorities”. As a consequence, the encrypted data could not only be accessed to investigate criminal offenses. The Federal Intelligence Service should also have access to the data.

The technical implementation should be done with the help of a master key. Thus, with the help of a man-in-the-middle attack, the states would be able to intercept the messages and decipher them with the aforementioned key. However, a master key also increases the possibility of misuse or decreases the strength of the encryption. Should unauthorized persons gain possession of the mentioned key, large-scale archives of encrypted messages could be read without any problems. It doesn’t help to implement a new key. This would only protect new messages.

In addition, authorities could create extensive archives and record communications and store them for several years. Although this is illegal due to the current legal situation, there have already been databases in the past in the form of stored license plate databases that had great potential for abuse. Thus, the surveillance of citizens should also be expanded in this country by levered encryption.