Introduction - Burdens of Proof - page 8

beyond mere rhetorical appeal—“technologies have clear value for people
in the activities they already carry out.” 14
A second line of argumentation focuses on the mathematization of
cryptography, a process that became central to the field with the publica-
tion in 1976 of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman's “New Directions in
Cryptography.” 15 Instead of cryptographers' traditional reliance on trial
and error for establishing the effectiveness of cryptosystems, “New Direc-
tions” proposed a new compact between mathematics and cryptography,
one that would transform an ancient craft into a modern science. Hence-
forth, the effectiveness of cryptosystems would be modeled within the
framework of algorithmics and computational complexity, two branches
of mathematics devoted to the quantification of computational processes.
With this move, cryptographers would finally achieve the historically
elusive goal of “provable security,” leaving behind the heuristics, beliefs,
and intuitions that had so often failed the field. Correspondingly, the
mathematical foundations of digital signatures would also translate into
an improved evidentiary paradigm for electronic documents, leaving
behind handwriting analysis, document forensics, and other legal practices
of questionable scientific credentials.
Yet, the mathematization of cryptography has met with mixed success.
Several fundamental types of cryptographic objects, such as hash functions
and block ciphers, have resisted mathematical formalization, with impor-
tant implications for the “provable security” paradigm. 16 Security practi-
tioners have found computational complexity largely irrelevant to their
concerns for products that deliver reasonable guarantees of security while
maintaining high levels of efficiency. And new and devastating classes of
attacks have entirely sidestepped the mathematical defenses of cryptosys-
tems by focusing on their physical embodiment in software and hardware
devices.
This resistance of certain phenomena to mathematization matters. The
defining computing project of our time, the mass quantification of social
processes necessary for Google's project “to organize the world's informa-
tion,” could not succeed without the cultural authority of number, data,
and algorithm. Indeed, modernity itself is indissociable from an under-
standing of the social body as following “statistical laws that looked like
brute, irreducible facts,” laws “that could only be noticed after social phe-
nomena had been enumerated, tabulated and made public.” 17 The business