Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Digital signature technology rode on the coattails of its more famous
sibling, encryption. In the mid-1970s, a nascent academic community had
begun to challenge the historical subjection of cryptographic research to
military and national security needs. Over the course of the next decade,
through a series of public confrontations over control of research agendas
and freedom of scientific communication, the community advocated for
a renewed public role for cryptography in shaping the character of emerg-
ing computer networks. The explosion of the Internet propelled cryptog-
raphy to the forefront of the cyberlibertarian movement, with its promise
to protect electronic free speech from the prying ears of governments.
At the same time, and beginning with public-key cryptography itself,
the cryptographic research community broadened its research agenda from
its historical focus on confidentiality to the design of technologies that
could replicate for networked information systems the protocols, proce-
dures, and artifacts that ensure the integrity of information necessary to a
functioning democracy—signatures, voting, electronic cash, copyright pro-
tection, certified mail, and the like. Driven by an explicit commitment to
combat the propensity of electronic networks for fine-grained surveillance,
this research agenda not only produced intriguing and innovative math-
ematical techniques but also attracted the necessary venture capital to
translate these techniques into hardware, software, and services and to
ready them for a predicted multibillion-dollar market for cryptographic
products.
Yet as the fumes of the dot-com crash cleared, much of cryptography's
project laid in the rubles. The expected market for public-key infrastruc-
tures (PKI), the computing infrastructure necessary for the deployment of
cryptographic technologies, utterly failed to materialize. Once valued at
£5.5 billion, Baltimore Technologies, the darling of the European PKI
industry, sold its core software assets in 2003 for £5 million. The rest of
the cryptographic research agenda similarly failed to translate into actual
infrastructure, as the business case for anonymous cash, encryption, and
digital signatures failed to carry the marketplace. The prophesied crypto-
graphic revolution did not come to be.
4
This topic develops a series of arguments to account for cryptography's
failure to perform, focusing on the case of digital signatures.
One line of argumentation questions the adequation of the digital with
the immaterial that pervades not only popular literature but also much of
