On Sun, 24 Dec 2000, Eric Cordian wrote:
Perhaps next year will be better. I'm almost begining to feel that Cryptology has achieved the status of a "Mature Science."
It's my impression that mature sciences don't have the same kind of foundational or engineering problems cryptography does. We still see surprises about what a "definition of security" should be, even in the public-key setting where people have investigated such things for nearly 20 years. Plus even when we figure that out, we'll still have to deal with the fact that the models used in theoretical crypto don't deal with some of the attacks possible in real life -- timing and power analysis come to mind. As does the van Someren and Shamir trick for finding keys because they look "too random." To say nothing of the nasty fact that passphrases, and therefore keys based on them, aren't random at all. Which does not play nice with models which assume keys are picked randomly. It may be true that this year was a lull in "interesting" cryptographic research (I don't know if that's quite true), but it doesn't seem to be because too many problems are solved. Rather, there are lots of open problems left which no one seems to know how to solve... -David