Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
the cryptographic and legal conceptual space. In this narrative, the Inter-
net (as cyberspace) offers the conditions for information's long-awaited
emancipation from its material shackles (with paper as the arch villain).
Indeed, information-age pundits have consistently underlined how an
essential element of the Internet's revolutionary power lies in its nature as
a frictionless communication network where the ordinarily limitations of
physical media cease to apply.
5
John Perry Barlow, for example, claimed
that “legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and
context” did not apply to the Internet because “they are all based on
matter, and there is no matter here.”
6
Less lyrical but equally influential,
Nicolas Negroponte also structured the argument of
Being Digital
around
the liberation of information from matter. Contrasting the costly and
laborious movement of physical goods with “the global movement of
weightless bits at the speed of light,” he concludes that in the digital era,
“the medium is no longer the message.”
7
It might be tempting to dismiss Barlow's and Negroponte's manifestos
as the expression of an irrational exuberance long since tempered by the
crash of the dot-com economy. Yet the conceptualization that on a funda-
mental level, digital information has escaped the constraints of the mate-
rial world continues to pervade both popular and specialized discourses. A
recent treatise on digital evidence states, for example: “Writings in the
digital realm are different. They do not depend on the alteration of matter.
Such records are very close to 'pure information,' and exist by virtue of a
mere succession of the differentiation of 1s and 0s, distinguished by elec-
tricity flowing in machine systems. In writing today, we deal in pure
information objects, unfettered by matter. They can be whisked or shaken
or rearranged in an instant.”
8
In this logic, because of its immateriality, digital information can only
be secured through the similarly immaterial mathematics of cryptography.
The authoritative
Handbook of Applied Cryptography
precisely articulates this
view: “What is needed then for a society where information is mostly
stored and transmitted in electronic form is a means to ensure information
security which is independent of the physical medium recording or con-
veying it and such that the objectives of information security rely solely
on digital information itself.”
9
I argue that this characterization has set up multiple challenges for the
translation of cryptographic research into actual software and hardware
