Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
a claim for their relevance to these practices. Hash functions, electromag-
netic radiation, the human perceptual system, sealed envelopes, and the
cognitive capabilities of users requested—with varying degrees of urgency—
that they be included in the deliberations. In response, the standard model
that has informed much cryptographic work in the Diffie-Hellman era has
been extended to include random oracles, the physical leakage of power,
users' visual acuity, and the security properties of scratch-cards.
Engaging with the inescapable materiality of information does not
signify some kind of demotion or regression. Instead, it suggests that what
perhaps best characterizes cryptographic practice is not an inevitable
ascension to mathematics, but rather ingenuity, playfulness, and pragma-
tism in its devotion to achieving (and defeating) counterintuitive com-
munication goals. Over the course of history, this ingenuity has consistently
taken advantage of the material properties of physical media, of the logical
properties of information encoding, and of their mutual interactions in
the service of these goals.
I propose an engagement with the material world offers in fact impor-
tant benefits. Taking advantage of the embodied capabilities of human
beings (memory, perception, cognition) and of the cultural and institu-
tional familiarity of pen-and-paper technologies (books, paper, envelopes)
may provide multiple pathways to broader social acceptance of crypto-
graphic design goals. Not only does embracing the material world offer
rich sources of inspiration for design, but it also enables more complex
strategies of technology adoption than the “build it and they will come”
philosophy that has so far implicitly driven the efforts of the community.
Rather than emphasizing its radical discontinuity with the paper-and-ink
world, cryptographic design can draw from existing cultural practices and
technological infrastructures as
resources
. Such an approach would directly
enhance the abilities of cryptographic technologies to suture themselves
into the existing social fabric, on multiple levels
—
cognitively, materially,
institutionally.
In
The Languages of Edison's Light
, Charles Bazerman argued that a key
to Edison's commercial successes laid precisely in his skill at negotiating
the boundaries of tradition and invention: “Despite the great changes that
came in the wake of the new technology, incandescent light and power
had first to be built on historical continuities of meaning and value. It had
to take a place within the discourse and the representational meaning
