Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
electronic authentication schemes, they argued public-key cryptosystems
could provide a “purely digital replacement” for signed written contracts.
The use of cryptography to “sign” digital documents seemed to point
to a more general role it might play in providing other analogues to paper-
based evidence. An important collection of papers published in 1992,
Contemporary Cryptology: The Science of Information Integrity,
signaled this
shift away from narrower concerns with confidentiality. In his introduc-
tion, Gustavus Simmons contextualized at length the basis for this con-
ceptual shift:
The conduct of commerce, affairs of the state, military actions, and personal affairs
all depend on the parties to a transaction having confidence in there being means
of accomplishing such functions as privacy, proof of identity, authority, ownership,
license, signature, witnessing or notarization, date of action, certification of origi-
nation and/or receipt, etc. As a result, an elaborate, and legally accepted, collection
of procedural and physical protocols have evolved that specify how to create records
(information in documentary form) in such a way that later disputes as to who is
liable, or of the nature of that liability, or of when a liability was incurred, etc., can
be arbitrated by a third party (typically in a court of law). The essential point is
that existing precedent depends on information having a physical existence in the
form of a document which have been signed, witnessed, notarized, recorded, dated,
etc. The “proof” process, if it must be invoked, depends almost entirely on the
physical instrument(s) as the means for establishing the integrity of the recorded
information.
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In this view, digital information no longer had any material existence
that could provide means for its authentication. In the context of elec-
tronic networks, the various forms of resistance provided by the intimate
binding of ink to paper fibers cease to obtain. Only mathematical (i.e.,
cryptographic) transformations of the information itself could and would
provide the constraints necessary for information to achieve the same
functions:
In an information-intensive society however, in which the possession, control,
transfer, or access to real assets is frequently based on incorporeal information—that
is, information whose existence is not essentially linked to any physical record, and
in which a license (to use, modify, copy, etc., valuable or sensitive information) is
similarly determined, it is essential that means be found to carry out all of the func-
tions associated with establishing the integrity of information mentioned above,
based only on the internal evidence present in the information itself . . . as distin-
guished from other non-information-dependent means such as documentary
records, physical security, etc.
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