Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
4
The Equivalent of a Written Signature
The success of the public-key paradigm gave much impetus to Simmons's
research program for cryptography, one that sought to define and create
digital analogues to the paper-based artifacts and protocols that provide
for information integrity in the social world. Such analogues would have
to perform in a radically different material environment than their paper-
based counterparts, an environment where information objects are acces-
sible only through the mediation of computing hardware and software,
where the usual associations between the materiality of those information
objects and their evidential value could no longer be presumed, where
parties to the transactions would not be physically present to each other
but instead communicating through networks. In the case of cryptographic
signatures, performance would have to be measured not only for their
viability as a mathematical object, but also as a legally codified means of
evidence. In Diffie and Hellman's words, “In order to develop a system
capable of replacing the current written contract with some purely elec-
tronic form of communication,
we must discover a digital phenomenon with
the same properties as a written signature
.”
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But what exactly
is
a written signature? Its utter banality seems to
require no explanation, yet also raises suspicions of greater complexity. As
Béatrice Fraenkel notes, “For us moderns, this sign presents itself over a
background of tenacious forgetting.”
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The distant origins of the signature
in antiquity and the Middle Ages, its historical evolution and current
incarnation as the idiosyncratic writing of one's name, and its relationship
to other signs of identity have received little attention from scholars. Its
association with another mundane artifact, the record—at once the fun-
damental instrument of bureaucratic rationalization, and, as Bruno Latour
has quipped, “the most despised of all ethnographic objects”—has not
helped signature's overall standing.
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