Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
that use sophisticated protocols to protect information. Just as an under-
standing of biology goes a long way towards making informed decisions
on environmental issues, understanding the technical issues involved in
cryptography enables informed decisions on privacy issues.” Indeed, the
confounding lack of uptake of cryptographic technologies in the market-
place may be attributed to the public's inability to grasp their potential:
“If more people knew about such things, they would lobby for their adop-
tion to better protect privacy in everyday transactions.”
60
Such research thus focuses on the design of effective pedagogical tools
for explaining cryptographic capabilities to lay publics as might be found
in schools, universities, popular science television programs, and the like.
Encryption and key distribution, for example, might be demonstrated
using a chain and padlock, and the intrinsic cryptographic properties of
playing cards can be used to develop “simple and meaningful visual meta-
phors” for many protocols.
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Given their familiarity and inherent dramatic
structure, even children's folk tales may prove helpful: Quisquater and
colleagues leverage the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in the
service of explaining zero-knowledge protocols to children
—
even includ-
ing advanced theoretical concepts such as simulation and parallel
executions.
62
Although also concerned with the popularization of cryptographic con-
cepts, the second approach to cryptographic literacy conceives of this
objective as one that may drive cryptographic research itself.
63
In this vein,
Fellows and Koblitz have proposed the development of a “Kid Krypto”
subdiscipline, where the
accessibility
of protocols is a design goal in its own
right: “As in the case of the more traditional criteria
—
eficiency and secu-
rity
—
the search for cryptosystems that meet the accessibility standard
naturally leads to interesting theoretical and practical questions. It is a new
challenge to determine how much can be really be done with minimal
mathematical knowledge, and to find ways to present cryptographic ideas
at a completely naïve level.”
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Kid Krypto is also unplugged, “crayon-
technology” cryptography. It is not exposure to computers that leads to
cryptographic literacy, but rather, “wide-ranging experience working in a
creative and exciting way with algorithms, problem-solving techniques
and logical modes of thought.”
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In “Comparing Information Without Leaking It,” Fagin, Naor, and
Winkler join the cognitive criterion of accessibility and the material crite-
