Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Whatever their position on these issues, cryptographers exhibited the
firm convictions that technology trumps regulation every time and that
encryption as code could not be caged and—once released—would inevita-
bly roam free, spreading security, freedom of speech, and democracy in its
wake. In making their case, the community developed a playful style of
policy interventions, deriding attempts at controlling encryption through
regulation. Ironically, to craft these interventions, they often dipped into
the steganographic toolbox, embedding code into material carriers to
demonstrate the invincibility of the digital. Indeed, though mostly shut
out of the official modern cryptography canon, steganography continued
to demonstrate its relevance, as public-key mechanisms exhibited sur-
prising properties of concealment, with the potential to blackmail users
with their own keys. The possibility of funkspiels, of hidden trapdoors,
thus continued to threaten public confidence in cryptographic technolo-
gies, even as cryptographers struggled with establishing the coherent math-
ematical foundations that would ground their own trust.
Regardless of these debates, by the mid-1990s, cryptography's agenda
had expanded far beyond its traditional focus on military applications of
encryption. Instead, it concerned itself with the design of mathematical
analogues to the complex paper-based artifacts and protocols that have
evolved over centuries to realize a broad range of security objectives. Of
these analogues, signatures seemed to have the most promising future, the
best chance of leaping from the serene pages of scientific journals into the
hustle and bustle of the real world. In short, signatures might just become
crypto's killer app. Such an achievement would first involve designing a
fuller model of digital signatures and determine its relationship to paper-
based signatures. Eventually, it would also involve determining the legal
status of such an object.
