30 Years of Public Key Cryptography 83
An anonymous reader writes "Public key crypto turned 30 last night, and the biggest names in crypto turned out to celebrate at an event hosted at the Computer History Museum. Voltage Security teamed with RSA to bring together some of the most famous cryptographers of yesterday (Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman) and today (Dan Boneh), along with luminaries Ray Ozzie, Brian Snow, and Jim Bidzos. From the ZDNet article: 'NYT reporter John Markoff, who has covered Silicon Valley for 30 years, was master of ceremonies, and started off by saying that no technology has had a more profound impact than cryptography, and that public-key cryptography has been underappreciated for its role in the Internet. Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.' You can view the podcast and pictures of the event at the Voltage Security site.."
Celebration! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Celebration! (Score:2)
Damn! (Score:2)
When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:3, Funny)
(If you do a run of stickers with that on them, kindly tell me, and I'll buy some from you.)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:0)
PS: Either way, me too!
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:0)
Let's hope noone will sue me because of the dmca.
It's a simple substitution cypher:
a -> n
b -> o
c -> p
e -> r
f -> s
g -> t
h -> u
i -> v
j -> w
l -> y
n -> a
p -> c
r -> e
v -> l
y -> l
Fun to decrypt with frequency analysis, specially because the most frequent 'e' is only used once :)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:0)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:0)
Well, if we define true as one, then: cos 2pi
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:0)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:2)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Faddons.mozilla.org%2Ffirefox%2F770%2F [mozilla.org]
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:2)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:4, Funny)
(for the uninformed, NTT allows you to easily install extensions that are only marked for compatibility with older FF versions)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:1)
Re:When cryptography is outlawed, (Score:2)
30th birthday of what exactly? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:30th birthday of what exactly? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:30th birthday of what exactly? (Score:3, Informative)
[1] Actuallly, some claim a German beat them to the punch.
I assure you I'm not American. I just feel the Americans deserve a hell of a lot more credit for this stuff because without RSA we might never have gotten public key cryptography. IIRC Clifford Cox's work was only made public because RSA became widely known.
Re:30th birthday of what exactly? (Score:2)
Diffie/Hellman/Merkle's work was pointing the way; I have to think public-key would've happened in relatively short order (within 5-10 years) without RSA.
first papers on PKC (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a math undergrad interested in large prime numbers and numerical computing when the first hints on what RS&A were doing came out in Scientific American. At that time I had only 3 years programming experience and it was a big thrill to get a public key crypto email system working (first in Pascal on a DEC-20) but I only distributed it to a small group as the university was not yet on the Internet.
I told the story to PZ at a conference about 8 years ago and we had a good laugh wondering how things might have developed differently had that program been distributed on Usenet by someone outside the USA!
Re:first papers on PKC (Score:1, Interesting)
May be older than 30 years old (Score:4, Interesting)
It is likely that the NSA discovered public key Cryptography in the late 60's or early 70's. Public Key Cryptography may be as old as 40 years old at this point, but without clarification from the NSA, we will never be certain.
---
Yahma
Proxy Storm [proxystorm.com] - Free Anonymous Proxy Service for security conscious individuals.
Re:May be older than 30 years old (Score:0)
Re:May be older than 30 years old (Score:1)
Actually I'm SURE it is (Score:2)
Can anyone back this up? I definitely remember watching the film, and feeling very sorry for the poor bloke who got basically nothing for his idea.
Re:Actually I'm SURE it is (Score:2, Insightful)
Worst. post. (Score:-1, Redundant)
30 years eh? (Score:1)
No technology with a more profound impact? (Score:2, Insightful)
I hear that the wheel had quite an impact. Oh yeah and the steam engine. Not fogetting the printing press. Or even plastic. Seriously, do they even think before parroting this nonsense?
Re:No technology with a more profound impact? (Score:2)
Insipid journalists.
Re:No technology with a more profound impact? (Score:1, Insightful)
PKC and other forms of cryptography are extremely important and vital to the success of NATIONS. Plus, imagine how hard it would be to communicate over the Internet without PKC, you'd have to syncronize keys with the second party all the time!
Re:No technology with a more profound impact? (Score:2)
Re:No technology with a more profound impact? (Score:1)
GCHQ in 1973! (Score:5, Informative)
stop spoiling the Americans party (Score:0, Funny)
oh come on everyone knows the Americans cracked the Enigma code and single handedly beat the Germans in WW2, invented the steam engine, electricity, telephones, TV and are the World champions of baseball and football !
GO USA #1 *
*not applicable in 191 countries
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:2)
At GCHQ, they did not understand the importance of it.
Comment removed (Score:1)
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:2)
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:2)
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:0)
"GCHQ employs more mathematicians than the average university maths faculty?
And fewer English majors than the average Englishes faculty.
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:1)
Re:GCHQ in 1973! (Score:-1)
Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman invented RSA encryption in 1977. It was better than DES, because it did not require the both parties to be online at the same time. It did require a public key directory, though.
It was not until years later that the British Government announced that the GCHQ had invented RSA cryptography in 1973. James Ellis, a very eccentric cryptographer and Clifford Cocks, a young mathematician were responsible for the discovery. Malcom Williamson, another GCHQ mathematician, verified the valitidty of their methods. Both were graduates of Manchester Grammar School and contestants in the 1968 Mathematical Olympiad.
Then in June 1991 Phil Zimmermann released PGP to the public, which earned him a grand jury investigation for being an arms dealer, as cryptography is classified with missiles an bombs.
Now, governments around the globe are trying to ban strong encryption, as it ruins digital wiretapping. If strong encryption is restricted by the government, such as part 3 of the UK's RIP Act, the future of computer commerce is at stake.
Missed opportunity (Score:1, Flamebait)
I'm disappointed that our government missed this key opportunity to ensure their surveillance will go forward willout having to deal with that silly "encryption" and such
Then again, maybe on that note, we can organize a "Islamic Fundamentalist Luncheon" and let some mob-folk "take care of things."
Re:Missed opportunity (Score:2)
The real "missed opportunitity", if you think of it as such, was from the middle of the last century in Bletchley Park and elsewhere. That's when cryptography and computer science started to come together.
OB Star Trek Reference (Score:1)
Great to see Ray Ozzie in that list. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, others used it before then, but in terms of a widely used corporate end user audience, it was (and still is to some extent) unique.
Yes, you may now rag on Notes if you like -- of course, keep in mind it remains the only real solution for a major corporation that by public key authentication and encryption by default, has a fully functional smtp mta built in, handles the front end needs of end users well enough for salespeople (not like a typical pop or imap client) and of course, fully supports linux as a server platform (and within a few months as a client platform as well).
Re:Great to see Ray Ozzie in that list. (Score:2)
Like many other good ideas I believe it was given a bad reputation by the lusers who invested their careers in notes as a platform for everything.
Once standardisation sets in notes becomes a reason not to do stuff, or at least not to bother trying.
No Zimmerman? Where was the real party? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Zimmerman? Where was the real party? (Score:1)
Re:No Zimmerman? Where was the real party? (Score:2)
eCommerce possible without public key crypto (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't like to take away from their excellent work, but it is possible, though inconvenient, to do private-key crypto for such things.
Your bank, for example, would need to [paper] mail you a private key to type into your machine (or give you a thumbdrive with it, whatever you like). Inconvenient, yes; you'd need a new key for each company you interact with. Probably it would encourage a few monopolies (amazon and eBay) to dominate, since you'd only need to interact with them by paper once. But not impossible.
Re:eCommerce possible without public key crypto (Score:1)
Merchants could do the same and the problem is mostly solved without a PKI. We still might need to do this anyway.
One time tokens anyone?
Re:eCommerce possible without public key crypto (Score:1)
would need to [paper] mail you a private key
This would not work at all, because someone could easily intercept your mail at the mailbox, post office, etc. Sending plaintext by snail mail is just as secure as sending plaintext over the net, i.e. its not.
For this to be secure you would probably have to go and pick up your private key at the bank yourself.
Re:eCommerce possible without public key crypto (Score:1)
It's (snail)mailed out to you, then you login and change it.
I don't see the difference between this and mailing you a key.
And yes i know them mailing personal authentication data to you is horrendously insecure, but that's not the point.
The real advantage to PKI is that you can set up the encryption prior to the exchange of authentication data, which makes application design much easier.
Re:eCommerce possible without public key crypto (Score:2)
Eg: SSL uses public key encryption and you don't need a "new key on a bit of paper" for each store. Note that SSL only makes the communication secure, you still need the credit card details to buy stuff.
No OpenSSH developers? (Score:0)
Wrong Date (Score:3, Informative)
I suppose the commercial victors get to (re)-write the history books then.
Re:Wrong Date (Score:2)
How many use it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could it be that encryption is still to complex for most people?
I will continue to encrypt emails to those I know can handle it and will sign others.
implementations? (Score:1)
Re:implementations? (Score:2)
Re:implementations? (Score:1)
Re:implementations? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How many use it? (Score:2)
Re:How many use it? (Score:2)
Re:How many use it? (Score:2)
Barriers to use of email encryption (Score:4, Informative)
Complexity may be an issue, but I think it's a relatively minor one.
The biggest issue is that people simply really just don't care. When I try to advocate this stuff to laymen, by far the most common comment I hear is "So what if someone reads my email?" Most people don't think email privacy is worth protecting. Yes, even despite the news stories in the last few years (i.e. the government really is reading your email; it's not just a paranoid crackpot theory anymore).
Another issue is something that has actually gotten worse in the last 10 years. Webmail is very popular. It's nearly impossible to do email encryption correcting using webmail instead of "real" (e.g. POP or IMAP) mail. You either have to trust a foreign system with your keys, or you have to have so much non-web-intelligence running inside the web browser (e.g. a Java applet or something) that it isn't really webmail anymore. And even if you make it sophisticated enough to run on the web browser, you lose one of the major advantages of webmail: checking your email from anywhere, including untrusted machines. (The only way to do it then, is for the user to do the crypto inside their head instead of using a computer.) It's a mess and it just can't be done right. As long as people want webmail, as long as they see it as a good thing instead of a bad thing, they can't have good encryption. (Well, unless they are the admin of the web server. e.g. One person at Google could conceivably use gmail as a secure webmail system. ;-)
In another 30 years... (Score:2)
Hopefully we see a world where the major email clients (including Thunderbird/Seamonkey) come with easy to use email encryption out of the box.
Hopefully we see a world where your communications and data are safe from people you would rather didnt see them (black-hat hackers, identity thieves, your worst enemy, your boss, the RIAA etc etc)
Re:In another 30 years... (Score:2)
1a) Mail servers that start caching SSH-style public keys for servers that they talk to. Then encrypt the transport between the two servers. There are definitely MITM attacks that could be mounted, but the outbound MTA might simply keep track of key-changed events in the log files. Let the admins worry about it, if they do.
1b) IPSec with opportunistic encryption for encrypting the transport. Maybe you get DNS (or secure DNS) involved for proving the validity of the public keys. Or maybe you take a page out of the SSH playbook and simply tell the user that the mail may not have been delivered to the system that we think it should've been delivered.
2) Mail clients that create a public key and hand it the POP3/IMAP server. Then the server could simply encrypt the message files as they get written to the disk using the user's public key. This runs into all sorts of issues (no web-access to your mail folder, difficulting in retrieving e-mail with another e-mail client, lost e-mail if you lose your private key). So I don't know how well that would work out in principle (probably not well).
Personally, I think securing the SMTP link is probably the most realistic. Paranoid MTA admins could decide that all keys have to be pre-validated before e-mail can be delivered to the remote system. The rest of us could simply accept the small risk of MITM and watch our log files for keys that change. Or check our destination keys against public lists of server keys (sort of a reputation service).
Re:In another 30 years... (Score:3, Informative)
Essentially, if the recipiant supports encryption, the recipiants public key is pulled from a key server. Then, the email client encrypts it using something similar to PGP or GPG. Something thats standard enough that anyone can implement it.
At the other end, it is decrypted by the mail client using the recipiants private key.
All that the servers in the middle see is an encrypted email (same as they would see if you encrypted an email right now with PGP or GPG or whatever). The servers dont need to know about the encryption or be changed in any way.
No issues with being able to access the email from anywhere, as long as you have your private key, any email client with the right encryption support would be able to decrypt the email (including web based email clients if you were willing to trust uploading your private key to a https:/// [https] server run by whoever provides your email)
And with this, mail servers (and mail server admins) never see the unencrypted email.
Assuming the key management is good enough (i.e. that you can trust that who the system says owns the key actually owns it), it can also be used to verify that the sender is who they say thay are.
The downside is the need to en- and de-crypt on the client side which might be an issue for some embedded applications (although these days most mobile phones, PDAs and the like that have internet/email generally have web browsers that understand SSL and if they have the CPU to handle SSL, they can probobly handle encrypted email)
30 Years of *Public* Public Key Cryptography (Score:2)
John Markoff (Score:3, Interesting)
The evils of public-key cryptography (Score:4, Informative)
I personally think that it would be far better to make use of shared-secret systems for when you need communication security, like logging onto banks. The solution to phishing is clearly to use a shared secret system, because things like IE7's anti-phishing filtering can be worked around. SRP6 is great, but unfortunately that is based on public-key technology (though doesn't actually involve a public key, like Diffie-Hellman).
I hope that someday it is proven that public-key cryptography cannot be securely attached to an NP-complete problem, and that either a fast discrete logarithm algorithm (*) is found or quantum computers take off.
(*) A fast solution to the discrete logarithm problem implies a fast solution to integer factorization.
Melissa
Re:The evils of public-key cryptography (Score:2)
"most uses of it are bad."
You must have a different definiton of "most" from the rest of us.
DRM can be implemented using either symmetric or public key crypto.
Re:The evils of public-key cryptography (Score:2)
YuO fail it!S? (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Overstatement (Score:3, Interesting)
Hardly. Phone conversations are not encrypted and can be/are intercepted, yet phone commerce is commonplace. Even in-person credit card purchases are hardly secure and there are a number of websites that do e-commerce without encryption. Without public key cryptography, more attention would be paid to security of the path between your ISP and the vendor. Websites could also have you set up username and password over a more secure channel and then use plain symmetrical encryption for the actual purchase.
No Schneier, Zimmermann, etc? (Score:0)
Sigh
Thanks for (holding back) encryption, RSA! (Score:3, Insightful)
And without the patent on public-key encryption that covered not just the method but the very idea of it, we might all have secured communications by now. But instead we are not much further ahead except for ssh which at least helps network admins.
I just have a hard time cheering for RSA which did nothing other than patent a mathematical formula discovered by multiple people and prevent it's dfree use in America and other countries that allow software patents.
I was using PGP back in the early 90's and was frustrated that it's use was hamstrung by the patent and US laws on exporting encryption software. What a waste.
Re:Thanks for (holding back) encryption, RSA! (Score:2)
Maybe I'm wrong but there are other ways of doing asymmetrical encryption schemes (elliptic functions in Galois fields) that are not patent encumbered.
Maybe there was no will to develop it?
Re:Thanks for (holding back) encryption, RSA! (Score:2)
Don't you just love software patents?
30 years - are you sure ? (Score:0)
The Dark Side of Cryptography (Score:0)
These shut down public key cryptography work for a long time. It wasn't until those wretched patents expired that internet commerce finally took off. And what have we seen with every other patent since then? People avoid them until it expires. The best patent owners can do is 'submarine' them, a la Unisys.
Rivest, Shamir or Adleman should go down in history as a group of assholes who were at the leading end of the malicious patent trade. When those guys die, I'll be sure to visit their graves and piss on them. Well, Rivest at the very least.