On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 03:30 PM, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
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Tim May wrote:
Not meaning to sound too harsh, but you need to think deeply about what cryptography is all about and why "trust me, I promise not to look" systems are not desirable or interesting.
I'm writing "(unblind (sign (blind X))) = (sign x)" on the board one hundred times.
You don't need to take our word for it--you need to see why modern cryptography avoids trust issues almost completely. I suggest that you dig up Chaum's "Communications of the ACM" paper from 1985: "Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete." I read it when it came out, and it triggered many ideas. It's online, or was as of a few years ago. Also, look at his paper on "Dining Cryptographers" to see how information-theoretically secure messages can be sent. Forget worrying about the details of various ciphers in Schneier's book, at least until you have grasped the essence of not relying on trust or "I promise not to look" b.s. schemes. BTW, a more abstract book is Oded Goldreich's "Foundations of Cryptography--Basic Tools," 2001. A little disorganized in places, but lots of core concepts. When you have fully grokked the way messages can be sent without any practical way of tracing their origin, as in the dining cryptographers example, your eyes will be opened. And zero-knowledge interactive proof systems (ZKIPS) will blow your mind. Never again will you argue in terms of "trust me" and "so long as they don't subpoena me" and "I promise not to look." (My simple explanation of ZKIPS in terms of demonstrating a Hamiltonian cycle for a graph is in the archives, from around 1992-3.) --Tim May "Al Qaida was never the real threat...Afghanistan is." "Aghanistan was never the real threat...Iraq is." "Iraq was never the real threat...Syria is." "Syria was never the real threat...stay tuned."