Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

For anyone here who doesn't know who the author is, Phil Rogaway is one of the most important academic cryptographers; he's responsible for OAEP, PSS, OCB, UMAC, FPE, and the constructions behind XTS, the universal standard for disk encryption.

The meat of the paper is in Sections 2 (where the unintended power dynamics of some modern academic crypto research projects is discussed) and 4 (where he provides suggestions for important practical projects academic cryptographers should tackle). Sections 1 and 3 are written for an audience of academics who might be less familiar with the political implications of crypto than the typical HN reader.

Essentially, Rogaway is trying to convince mathematicians to embrace the practical and political impact of their work.

Colin Percival gets a nice mention towards the end of the paper. I'd be over the moon if I were him. Congrats, Colin!

View on HN

This is a very good paper and it's disappointing that it didn't get higher on HN. That being said I disagree with some of paper's points. I don't believe that cryptographers should take on moral responsibility for how they perceive their work may or may not be used. If a malware writer uses XTS to lock up a hard drive should Dr Rogeway be morally responsible for that since he helped create the constructions for XTS? I would argue "no" because there is a moral separation between idea and implementation. We should not burden cryptographers with moral baggage that should be placed on the people who implement or set policy to implement.

There is a clear distinction between a moral responsibility and a legal liability. The moral duties of scientists versus policy makers have little to do with the moral separation between idea and implementation.

Are you arguing that the scientists who developed the first atomic bomb share no moral responsibility for the (positive or negative) effects of its use?

Dr. Rogeway is morally responsible both for the use of his encryption for cyber ransom and for the use of his encryption to allow private democratic and economic discourse.

If you think the negative effects of publicly available encryption outweigh the positive effects, it would be immoral to be working on making better encryption publicly available.

Obviously, there is a complicated moral calculus behind which effects are foreseeable/likely relative to your other available actions and their foreseeable/likely effects.

It's a nice paper. Turns out, he grudgingly believes what I've been saying all along:

"I am not optimistic. The gure of the heroic cryptographer sweeping in to save the world from totalitarian surveillance is ludicrous. And in a world where intelligence agencies stockpile and exploit countless vulnerabilities, obtain CA secret keys, subvert software-update mechanisms, infltrate private companies with moles, redirect online discussions in favored directions, and exert enormous in uence on standards bodies, cryptography alone will be an ineectual response. At best, cryptography might be a tool for creating possibilities within contours circumscribed by other forces."

Exactly. Gotta deal with those "other forces," which are social and legal. Otherwise, the opponents vast resources work around the few that try to resist with the crypto. Doesn't stop many technical people from thinking crypto will magically save the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com