Communication in the Presence of Adversaries - Burdens of Proof - page 16

2 Communication in the Presence of Adversaries

By all accounts, the face of cryptography has changed dramatically in the
last twenty-five years. The Code Book , Simon Singh's best-selling popular
history of the field, describes it as the resolution of the centuries-old battle
of wits between codemakers and codebreakers: “It is clear that cryptogra-
phers are winning the battle of information. Not only are today's codes,
in fact, unbreakable, but the key distribution problem has been solved.” 1
Crypto , Steven Levy's dramatic account of the birth of public-key cryptog-
raphy, argues that “code rebels” created the military-grade tools necessary
to ensure free and democratic access to electronic privacy in the coming
information society. In doing so, they succeeded in wrestling control of
the field away from Big Brotherian intelligence agencies and established
cryptography as an independent academic discipline. 2
Insiders have tended to portray the evolution of the field as that of
maturation from a craft to a bona-fide mathematical science, spurred by
the embrace of mathematical formalism in the second half of the twentieth
century. For example, in a historical survey of the discipline, Massey states,
“Our reason for calling the period up to 1949 the pre-scientific era of
cryptology is that cryptologists generally proceeded by intuition and
'belief,' which they could not buttress by proofs.” 3 Similarly, Jacques Stern,
a researcher and author of a popular account of the field, La Science du
Secret , makes the case for a cryptology that would have evolved in three
distinct stages:

What is cryptology? Is it an art? A technique? A science? It is perhaps all three—or
rather, it has been successively, during three periods of uneven duration, similar to
the stages of life or those of the development of the earth. We have chosen to stay
with this metaphor and to organize our reflections on history in three periods:
the artisanal age, the technical age, and the paradoxical age. The passage from one