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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Said it before and will say it again: privacy on internet is a technical problem only up to a certain point. It becomes a political problem at one point.

The power of strong and asymmetric cryptography led a lot of programmers into the belief that this is a political problem that can be solved with technical solutions but it is not.

Whether it is a subtle influence as is described here or as a heavy handed approach like in China, politics trump technological means.

If your government is actively trying to undermine the security and privacy of your technological solution, you need to be outspoken about it.

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Politicial solutions didn't work in the 1970s (Church Committee), the 1990s (Crypto Wars 1), or more recently. Hopefully it's just bad luck, because I think the best solution is for technical people to work on technical solutions while political people work on political solutions, and we can meet in the middle.

Unlike in politics, we've had success with technical solutions: strong E2E encrypted messaging is now normal, TLS is getting massive deployment, we have better crypto in general from key agreement to ciphers to libraries, and so much more.

To compare, what political solutions have equally improved the landscape? What's the political equivalent of getting Curve25519 into the hands of billions of users? What's the political equivalent of Signal Protocol going mainstream?

I've seen this same basic comment a lot in technical circles, and they ~all seem to subtly discredit technical solutions.

It makes me wonder: do people in political groups say, "let's stop with the political solutions and instead learn programming and cryptography and make technical solutions!" I sure hope not.

How did Crypto Wars 1 not have a political solution? Export controls were dropped, the Clipper chip was canned. It was mostly due to the political arguments being made at the time, not some unstoppable technological breakthrough.

The story that prompted this discussion is about BULLRUN, a government effort to backdoor crypto, which took place after Crypto Wars 1. And as we know, BULLRUN is just a small portion of what we've had to deal with since Crypto Wars 1 was supposedly "won."

Clipper chip failed on a technical basis as much as politically.

Just like all of the talk of crypto backdoors were DOA regardless of all the polticial rhetoric about its merits and downsides.

Clipper could have been fixed. The flaw in it was repairable. It was dropped instead because the idea was already politically weak so it didn't take much to push it over the edge.

Another point to add to yours is that there are so few people capable of understanding these convoluted protocols and cryptosystems. How many people are actively attempting to find weaknesses in AES, Elliptic Curves, SHA1, DLP, IFP? Also, often times those people currently examining these systems are the same exact people that were performing the state of the art cryptanalysis in the 90's

Like, the whole academic field of cryptography?

It's impressive how much progress that field has made since the 1990s. I know there are other criticisms of Applied Cryptography, but we understand so much now that we didn't at the time it appeared.

Something I find a bit disturbing is how much of our understanding of particular issues seems to depend on brilliant individuals. This is a bit like the Bernstein monoculture article that was discussed here recently but I'm also thinking of several of the items from Boneh's RSA attack overview paper, or maybe Xiaoyun Wang's hash function stuff.

Clearly all discoveries are going to be made and published by someone, but something about the academic field of cryptography keeps striking me as "wow, we're really lucky to have that person in this field". And that's a bit concerning because this phenomenon seems to suggest either that the field is still pretty small or still pretty immature, and in that sense may still be missing several important discoveries, for all the progress that it's made since the early nineties.

That's kind of a strange takeaway from Boneh's RSA attack paper, which is a survey of other researchers; IIRC, no two of the attacks in that paper came from the same researcher.

Bernstein is a bit of an odd duck in this regard, but if you look at some of the other "great personages of cryptography", you'll see that they're minting PhDs who are themselves going on to do important work, so the capacity of the field is expanding, not contracting to a single Bernstein monoculture point.

Bernstein's position in the field of practical cryptography is a product of an almost monomaniacal focus on commodity hardware performance and ease of use. The Bernstein monoculture will pass --- probably soon, after CAESAR finishes, or if people start taking pq crypto more seriously.

> That's kind of a strange takeaway from Boneh's RSA attack paper, which is a survey of other researchers; IIRC, no two of the attacks in that paper came from the same researcher.

I think I had that sense about individual items there, like Coppersmith's attack.

> if you look at some of the other "great personages of cryptography", you'll see that they're minting PhDs who are themselves going on to do important work, so the capacity of the field is expanding, not contracting to a single Bernstein monoculture point.

That's great news.

"Bernstein's position in the field of practical cryptography is a product of an almost monomaniacal focus on commodity hardware performance and ease of use. "

It's like a marketing issue to me. He focused on what type of crypto there was a large demand for. His solutions now have the First Mover advantage. Others can still compete although his will stay widely deployed or long-lasting in legacy systems.

It's easy to get this view from outside, but there's lots and lots of people working on this stuff within the field of cryptography that people in software engineering don't hear about because their work doesn't quite have that focus on implementation, that, for instance, DJB's work has.

The ciphers aren't the problem. The protocols are. IPSEC is insanely over engineered, as are most protocols these days.

It's not just in crypto. I was looking at the guts of web sockets the other day and was like WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY. I usually find myself asking "what problem does this solve?" over and over when I look at modern systems.

Of course even with my strong bias against it I am still occasionally guilty of over engineering. I just rewrote a major system to de-engineer it. I just keep thinking I will need it even when I have YAGNI tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

There's actually lots and lots of people attempting to break these primitives; just take a look at the proceedings of CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, FSE, CHES, etc.

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