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Comment by r-w | Hacker News Reader

I wish this article were more particular about what cryptologists are doing wrong? What exactly could they have done instead? Without that info, it just seems like pointing a finger at cryptologists and saying, “This is your job! Do something!”

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Rogaway wrote an companion essay for his invited talk that is rather accessible: http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

Modern academic cryptographers have veered off into a land of purely theoretical constructs. Now I love the cool theory we have in crypto, but it's sad that despite all this cool theory, very little of it becomes applicable in building practical privacy-preserving systems.

Rogaway, is a famed academic cryptographer, student of Silvio Micali, who basically founded modern academic cryptography. He is highly respected within the crypto community, so his words hold a lot of weight, and my interactions with crypto professors indicates that they agree with what he says.

That's probably not a fair criticism. This is reporting about an extremely famous cryptographer pointing his finger at other cryptographers.

Here's more about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10657540

Thanks for that pointer. I agree with GP's criticism, though, at least the way the article is written. I was trying to understand it through the lens of the nuclear analogy and failing drastically, because whereas those scientists were developing PRO-nuclear technology, these ones are (a priori, to first order) developing ANTI-surveillance technology.

Rogaway's paper starts with an extended discussion of the role of scientists in the nuclear arms race.

The nuclear analogy is a little odd, given that one of the reasons we don't have even more nuclear weapons / more states with nuclear weapons / nuclear weapons out in the wild is not technological... but because of international treaties and enforcement.

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