Crypto-making vs Crypto-breaking

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Tue May 6 11:09:29 PDT 2003


At 04:58 PM 05/03/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>I'll take this challenge, silly as it is.

What Tim said ...

>On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 01:50  PM, Eric Cordian wrote:
>>It should be noted, however, that advances in complexity theory or quantum
>>computing that would render cryptography useless, would also have a
>>detrimental effect on the state apparatus.

I'm not sure how detrimental an effect it would have.
Most of the evil things that the State can do don't depend on secrecy;
the day-to-day bureaucracy doesn't care, and Brinworld would have
much more of an effect on them (i.e. people actually bothering to
watch their bureaucrats in action, as opposed to wiretapping them.)
Disrupting the banking system and online trade is much more of an issue,
because tapping the flow of money is critical to the state,
and if it's not flowing, they've got problems.

Governments like secrecy, and if they assume that they have it,
individuals working for more willing to do things that would
get them fired, shot, or hanged, and the military would have to
go back to sending guys with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists
to haul one-time pads around for tactical applications,
and jackboot-net the rest of their planning data,
which would be annoying but isn't much different from 100 years ago,
when we managed to have a War To End All Wars just fine.

Tax collectors can work perfectly well without privacy, as long as
they don't mind violating their subjects' privacy -- which they don't.
Welfare-state bureaucrats and case-workers can redistribute income
and poke into people's family business without crypto-privacy.

>>So I pose a question.  You have two boxes.  In the first is crypto so
>>powerful that it will keep peoples data safe for 1000 years, against all
>>advances in mathematics, with perfect forward secrecy.
>>
>>In box number two is technology that will break any crypto designed by
>>mankind in the next 1000 years.
>>..
>>Which box do you pick?  And why?

The problem, of course, is that you don't get to pick :-)

We have crypto that lets you keep your data secure against
however many iterations of Moore's Law you believe will happen
in your lifetime (unless you believe Nanotech will save us all.)
Quantum crypto could trash public-key crypto, and we'd have to resort back to
keyserver-based systems like Kerberos.

The real risks aren't from picking the front door locks -
they're from the back doors.  Smart Dust isn't very dusty yet,
and Brinworld ubiquitous cameras aren't ubiquitous yet either,
but that 10000-bit RSA key and 7-DES don't do much good if you can't
enter the keys into your computer securely or read the decrypted results
without the dust on your Smart Contact Lenses also reading them
or the cameras across the room watching your eyes move
(either the hidden ones, or the wall-screen interactive TV ones)
or Microsoft Patriotware or Back Orifice relaying your keystrokes to fbivax.

Brinworld ain't pretty, but the important tax in the future won't be
the cash you pay, but the N% of your time you have to spend watching
your government officials at work, and the main way to minimize it
is to decrease the number of government workers that need watching.





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