Dude! It's wired!

dmolnar dmolnar at hcs.harvard.edu
Mon Dec 25 18:50:19 PST 2000




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






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