Legislation would ban fully encrypted communication

Christian Keszthelyi

Parliament is expected to vote today on a legislative amendment that would practically prohibit anyone from using communication applications in Hungary that employ end-to-end encryption, online daily index.hu reported this morning.

Saying it needs to fight the spread of terrorism, the Hungarian government proposed changes that would require applications using encryption to provide data for the Hungarian government on request, if the users of the application are suspected to be involved in activities related to terrorism, the online daily said.

If passed, the changes would practically make applications such as Hungary-based CrypTalk useless, as the software uses end-to-end encryption and no information of the communication between two parties are stored on servers.

That means that even the service provider for CrypTalk cannot decode messages on the application, and a similar situation exists for other applications.

On March 31, CrypTalk received an innovation award from the Hungarian government.