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From cpunks Tue Jun 3 12:16:18 1997 From: proff@suburbia.net Message-ID: <19970603160344.26296.qmail@suburbia.net> Subject: Cryptographic Mythology To: firewalls@greatcircle.com Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 02:03:43 +1000 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)] Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk
Here is something to amuse, delight and horrify - the tail of: _One Man's Search for a Cryptographic Mythology_. I recently wrote a VNODE (4.4bsd) based encrypted file-system. Now the day dawned when I decided it was high time to discard my rather egocentric working name _Proffs_ (i.e Proff File System) and cast about for a decent, respectable name. My first thought on this matter was: CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance -- against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the poets have credited him with as many as a hundred. Only, what was the relation between KERBEROS and CERBERUS? Pups from the same litter, or was the relationship a little more incestuous? I had to find out. There was no way - n o w a y - I'd be having my encrypted file system playing second fiddle to that evil authentication beast. KERBEROS; also spelled Cerberus. n. The watch dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance--against whom or what does not clearly appear; . . . it is known to have had three heads. . . Mythology couldn't get any more incestuous than that. 450,000 bytes of Greek polytheism later, and I'm wondering if the Gods of Olympus really had any high-paid guards to speak of except the multi-headed mongrel from Hades. I'm feeling down. I'm cursing the Ancients. I'm disrespectfully humming tunes `All and All it's Just Another Greek in the Wall', and `Athena be my Lover' when I discover: JANUS: in Roman mythology, custodian of the universe, god of beginnings. The guardian of gates and doors, he held sacred the first hour of the day, first day of the month, and first month of the year (which bears his name). He is represented with two bearded faces set back to back. Custodian of the universe. Guardian of gates and doors. Cooool. Janus. January. I like it. Only while I'm liking it, I'm thinking that I've heard the word Janus a lot before. I'm thinking it isn't just me who has looked up from the middle of a Greek mythology text, whilst in the throes of a name hunt with the words "Cooool" on their tongue. No: the Gods just don't smile on me that way. AltaVista confirms the truth of Heaven's bad attitude towards me. 17,423 references. _The Janus Mutual Trade Fund_, _The Janus Project_, _Janus ADA95_, a dozen ISPs from Canada (what is it WITH these Canadians?), _Janus' cool word list_ (turns out to be not so cool), _The Janus Ensemble_, _Hotel Janus_, _Janus Theatre_, _janus.com_, _janusfunds.com_, _Janus_ an Australian Police drama series and of course, the sixth moon of Saturn - _Janus_. Janus is out-of-the-picture. I'm not sure whether to feel smug or grim about the rest of the world's lack of originality. Guards. Guardians. The Greeks didn't have many with bite and I'm loosing patience with the whole culture. Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia do not grace me. What I need is something that evokes passion within my cryptographic domain. And when you come down to it, that means something which produces copious amounts of gore and blood, at will, from those who would dare to pass its demesne of protection. The Erinyes, or Furies, were three goddesses who punished by their secret stings the crimes of those who escaped or defied public justice. The heads of the Furies were wreathed with serpents, and their whole appearance was terrific and appalling. Their names were Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. They were also called Eumenides. Aye. Plenty of gore there. But somewhat lacking in cryptographic analogy. Fantastic material for the group that doesn't meet at number 41 every Saturday night though. They will appreciate what the Erinyes were trying to achieve. Somewhat heartened, my mind turns to the Erinyes' dress sense. "..heads of the Furies were wreathed with serpents, and their whole appearance was terrific and appalling". Terrific. Serpents. Terrific \Ter*rif"ic\, a. [L. terrificus; fr. terrere: to frighten + facere: to make. See Terror, and Fact.] Causing terror; adapted to excite great fear or dread; terrible; as, a terrific form; a terrific sight. Is it a symptom of society in decay that this word has come to mean: Excellent \Ex"cel*lent\, a. [F. excellent, L. excellens, -entis, p. pr. of excellere. See Excel.] 1. Excelling; surpassing others in some good quality or the sum of qualities; of great worth; eminent, in a good sense; superior, as an excellent man, artist, citizen, husband, discourse, book, song, etc.; excellent breeding, principles, aims, action. Or as Milton would say: To love . . . What I see excellent in good or fair. On the other hand, David Hume (1711-1776): The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature. The most sprightly wit borders on madness; the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy; the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust; the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments. And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains, as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing. Perhaps it is the sign of a brain in decay, rather than a society that I dwell on it so, because Terrific hair serpents of course lead unfailing into the arms of the Medusa. A guardian of fearsome looks, but dubious motivations according to authorities like Clash of the Titans (1981). A moot point, perhaps as Princeton's history department no longer wants to talk to me. I'm cast adrift, to rely on my Plasticine childhood memories and the mythological swamp of the web. NAME: Medusa FAVORITE PASTIME: Turning men to stone PLACE OF ORIGIN: Los Alamos Secret CIA Lab SPECIAL GIFTS: Petrified Aggregate Projectist FAVORITE MOVIE: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers GOALS IN LIFE: To be a nice person FAVORITE BOOK: Madonna's biography PET PEEVE: Bad hair days Jesus. I've been sucked into comic book hell. Princeton, take me back. I won't curse at the ancient Greek's sexual proclivities anymore. I'm sure chaste marriages were very daunting to those yet to have them. I was only joking. Lighten up will you? But, alas, the history faculty however was still nursing its wounds, and was not ready to forgive me. I'd have to find an authoritative source somewhere else. Perhaps I could filter out the comic book hell contaminants and come up with respected history Ivy, even if it wasn't Princeton Ivy. To decapitate - to castrate. The terror of the Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. The hair upon the Medusa's head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration. Sigmund Freud The Medusa's Head You had to hand it to Sigmund. He was nothing if not authoritative, and after reading his inspiring words on the terrific serpent haired woman, it became clear to me that _Proffs_ and the Gorgon had somewhat unresolved metaphorical incompatibilities. I didn't want my software giving anyone a castration complex. I decided to put aside the denizens of Olympus from contest verbatim. I'd read Fraud on Perversions a few years before and knew Medusa was just a portent of what was to come. What I needed was another polytheist culture entirely. Latin didn't help me. Nearly all the Roman Gods had been vilely plagiarised from the Greeks, Latin names or not. Freud knew this as well as I did. The Norse gods were of little assistance to me. The only one worth paying school to was Loki, the Norse god of mischief. Loki was a very cool fellow, which was why his name has been appropriated as a moniker by virtually every Bjorn, Sven, and Bob hacker to come out of Scandinavia in the last 10 years. No, Loki was not for me. The problem craved for a polytheist mythology outside the realm of my, and more importantly Sigmund Freud's, Western European upbringing. The answer to my question was by definition locked within a body of history I didn't know an onion skin about. In order for the pilgrim to reach the master he must first place his foot on the path, no matter how gradual the slope up the mountain of enlightenment. Zen Buddhism is good like that. Fabricating parables up as you go along that is. Zen master Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A young novice began to imitate him in this way. When Gutei was told about the novice's imitation, he sent for him and asked him if it were true. The novice admitted it was so. Gutei asked him if he understood. In reply the novice held up his index finger. Gutei promptly cut it off. The novice ran from the room, howling in pain. As he reached the threshold, Gutei called, "Boy!". When the novice returned, Gutei raised his index finger. At that instant the novice was enlightened. But wait. This Koan isn't fabricated. At least, not by me. And unlike most Zen Koan's I think you will agree that it pleasantly satisfies Schopenhauer's "life, without pain, has no meaning". However, semantically I'm seeing a very unhealthy correlation to forgetting one's encryption key and losing one's finger. My mind is drawn to the memory of the real-life nightmare of laying in the easy-chair of a Swanston St. hypnotherapist suite, gazing intently into a bright, but distant red light, while chanting the mantra "I am not cynical about hypnotherapy. I am not cynical about hypnotherapy. I am not cynical about an Indian doctor with a 5th floor office decorated coup'd'Edelstien. I'm not cynical about a man who claims that his foremost clientele are rich middle aged women who have put their jewellery somewhere "safe" and consequently are unable to recall the location. I'm not cynical about a hypnotist who extols the virtues of having a M.D. so his patients can claim 2/3rds of the cost of these jewellery retrieval sessions under Medicare. I'm not cynical that these middle aged women are infact suffering from some form of Mesmer complex. And by all the powers in Heaven, I have no pessimism about recalling my god-damned pass-phrase!". I never did remember the pass-phrase and you will notice Gutei keeps very quiet about what he does with the novice's finger. In this particular case, given the value of the data, I would have traded placed with Gutei's novice, before you can say "Boy! Was I enlightened". I put my chin on my knee, and stare at the grain of my beige plastic monitor case. Unless I could jump into another reality it was the end of the line for _Proffs_ and _One Man's Search for a Cryptographic Mythology_. Boy! Was I bummed. One of the great sins of us programmers is procedural thinking. And it was exactly this sort of folly I was engaging in. There were around 6 billion other realities going about their business. I grant you that 2 billion of these were no doubt indulging in the confusion and diffusion of an avalanche of pseudo-random mental images and sequences we associate with dreams, and probably another 2 billion busy expanding their minds with the powerful products of hash or decaying into a compressive state of increasing entropy and beer rounds. This still left a select 2 billion souls with which to weave my work. If I approached them directly rather than by analysing the information trails they left behind, I'd stand a good chance of getting my feet onto the path of cryptographic mythological enlightenment. I have a Swedish friend who calls himself Elk on odd days and Godflesh on even days. Don't ask why. As far as I know he's not bisexual. Elk listened to my quest for cryptographic myth. He had pondered, and uncovered a diamond in the rough. MARUTUKKU. The third name is MARUTUKKU, Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates. F a r o u t. Master of the arts of protection. Chained the Mad God. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates. Even the very word MARUTUKKU looks like it has been run through a product cipher. But I wasn't about to trust the work of a self-admitted Swedish Sumeria freak who was obviously suffering from a bi-polar moniker disorder. Was it mere coincidence that MARUTUKKU was an anagram for KUKU MART and KUKU TRAM? I didn't want MARUTUKKU to end up as another cog in the annals of Freudian analogy. What I needed was the sort of Authoritative History that only Princeton's history faculty could provide. The tablets of the Enuma Elish: The Akkadian Creation Epic Based on the translation of E. A. Speiser, with the additions by A. K. Grayson, Ancient Near-Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, third edition, edited by James Pritchard (Princeton, 1969), pp. 60-72; 501-503, with minor modifications. This work, the ancient Mesopotamian creation epic consisting of seven tablets, tells of the struggle between cosmic order and chaos. It is named after its opening words. It was recited on the fourth day of the ancient Babylonian New Year's festival. The text probably dates from the Old Babylonian period, i.e., the early part of the second millennium B.C.E. [...] The third name is MARUTUKKU Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates. [...] MARUTUKKU truly is the refuge of his land, city, and people. Unto him shall the people give praise forever. All praise the MARUTUKKU! My search had born a ripe and tasty fruit indeed. The quest for a cryptographic mythology was complete. Or was it? The words of Hume kept coming back to me and I had a nagging feeling that there was some substance in them. If MARUTUKKU was my exquisite cryptographic good, of wit, effusive joy, ravishing pleasure and flattering hope; then where was the counter point? The figure to its ground - the sharper evil, the madness, the melancholy, the most cruel lassitudes and disgusts and the severest disappointments. Was Hume right? Because if he was, there was only one organisation this string of hellish adjectives could represent. The cryptographic devil with its 500,000 sq feet of office space in Maryland. But surely there could be no reference to such an organisation in the 4,000 year old Babylonian tablets. The idea was preposterous. Wasn't it? TABLET VII OF THE ENUMA ELISH: ESIZKUR shall sit aloft in the house of prayer; May the gods bring their presents before him, that from him they may receive their assignments; none can without him create artful works. Four black-headed ones are among his creatures; aside from him no god knows the answer as to their days. It's a cold and wintry night, here in Melbourne. Despite this, the gusts of wind and rain seem to be unusually chilling. What had I, in my search for a cryptographic mythology, stumbled onto? I look hard at the seven letters E-S-I-Z-K-U-R. A frown turns to a smile and then a dead pan stare. I write down: IRK ZEUS -- Prof. Julian Assange |If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people |together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks proff@iq.org |and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu |immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery ----- End of forwarded message from proff@suburbia.net -----