Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
ence on the Afghan conflict: “There are known knowns. These are things
we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there
are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown
unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know.” Although
this is perhaps an inescapable condition of all systems of knowledge pro-
duction, few fields share cryptography's historical predicament, whereby
unknown unknowns are an explicit product of structural conditions,
including national security interests and the control and censorship of
scientific literature. As the next chapter discusses, this dialectic of openness
and secrecy has strongly shaped the relationship between the scientific
establishment and intelligence agencies. Furthermore, the entire edifice of
modern cryptography is based on an explicit balancing act between math-
ematical “known knowns” and “known unknowns”—for example, the
relative computational difficulty of performing certain algorithms.
Yet Rumsfeld's tripartite classification of knowledge is incomplete
without the (appropriately occulted) fourth term of the equation, the
“unknown knowns.” Philosopher Slavoj Žižek defines them as “the dis-
avowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to
ourselves.”
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One aim of this topic is to allow some of these beliefs and
suppositions to float to the surface so that cryptography can become a
more reflective form of technical practice.
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Of particular import is the
implicit association of computer and mathematics, as it endows digital
information with the special cultural authority that has historically accrued
to mathematics as pure symbolic expression of natural laws. One contem-
porary form of that association was cemented in 1976 by the publication
of modern cryptography's defining manifesto, Diffie and Hellman's “New
Directions in Cryptography.”
