Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Simmons thus saw the business of cryptography as the design of ana-
logues for the wide range of methods, protocols, and artifacts with which
to “prevent cheating.” The entire range of information integrity func-
tions—identification, authorization, license, certification, signature, nota-
rization, concurrence, liability, receipts, endorsement, validation, time of
occurrence, authenticity of files, vote, proof of ownership, and of course,
privacy—were in need of such cryptographic analogues.
The
Handbook of Applied Cryptography
, the defining summary of the field
as it stood in 1997, reiterated much of Simmons's analysis of the immate-
riality of digital information: “What is needed then for a society where
information is mostly stored and transmitted in electronic form is a means
to ensure information security which is independent of the physical
medium recording or conveying it and such that the objectives of informa-
tion security rely solely on digital information itself.”
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It also made the
call for cryptography to provide “analogues of the 'paper protocols' cur-
rently in use,” arguing that the shift to the digital presented “a unique
opportunity for society to introduce new and more efficient ways of ensur-
ing information security.”
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Information security would require a mixture
of technical and legal skills, and the technical means would be “provided
through cryptography.” Such concerns with ensuring law and order on the
electronic frontier stood in vivid contrast with cryptography's renegade,
cyberlibertarian image.
Firm Foundations
Another important research direction sought to continue Diffie and Hell-
man's initial impetus to establish solid mathematical foundations to the
ad hoc collections of techniques generated over the years by the commu-
nity. Not only were cryptographers facing a much broader range of security
goals than mere encryption, but the security afforded by the number theo-
retic problems underlying public-key cryptography remained largely unde-
fined. Even while working from a much more mathematical framework,
much of the proofs for cryptographic primitives and protocols still appeared
unsystematic. Beginning in the early 1990s, Oded Goldreich, cryptogra-
phy's most famous advocate of foundationalism, has called on cryptogra-
phers to develop a coherent framework for proving the security of
cryptosystems: “It is our opinion that the design of cryptographic systems
has to be based on firm foundations; whereas ad-hoc approaches and heu-
ristics are a very dangerous way to go.”
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