As part of a draft regulation against child pornography, Madrid is pushing for a ban on end-to-end encryption within messaging applications.

The solution is radical. As part of a draft European regulation to combat the dissemination of child pornography content, the Spanish government is proposing to ban end-to-end encryption within messaging applications.

"Ideally, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption," explains a Madrid representative in a European Council working document, revealed by Wired.

However, the Spanish proposal has no chance of success: it would require the agreement of all 27 EU countries, including several capitals, such as Berlin and Helsinki, which are already reluctant to limit end-to-end encryption.

Encryption has become widespread

End-to-end encryption is a secure communication process that prevents third parties from accessing data. On messaging platforms, this means that only the sender and recipient can read messages. This feature has become increasingly widespread in recent years.

However, end-to-end encryption poses a problem for authorities and intelligence services, who can no longer ask messaging applications to provide them with private exchanges, for example during a police investigation. In recent years, American and European officials have proposed imposing backdoors reserved for the authorities.

No technological solution

In Europe, the project to combat child sexual abuse aims to introduce restrictions on end-to-end encryption. As it stands, the text allows national authorities to require communications platforms to scan all private conversations for child pornography and grooming content.

This proposal is supported by the majority of European governments: 15 out of the 20 cited in the Council's working document. However, some of them are calling for guarantees that end-to-end encryption will not be weakened. However, an impact study carried out by the European Parliament points out that there is currently no technological solution to achieve this.

Source: L'Usine Digitale