The moral character of cryptographic work (2015)

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

by TheBigRoomXXL • 3 years ago

86 56 3 years ago

web.cs.ucdavis.edu

barathr• 3 years ago

Those interested in this topic might also find a couple other papers by Phil interesting:

1. Practice-Oriented Provable Security and the Social Construction of Cryptography: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/cc.pdf

2. An Obsession with Definitions (Section 5): https://books.google.com/books?id=SwOkDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA18&ots=...

keepamovin5• 3 years ago

I thought about something related quite a lot. Developing a cryptographic hash^1 and some of the reactions were entirely dismissive. Hostile as if (not against me per se, but) almost against the idea of developing crypto outside of the Church. As if Scripture forbade such a blasphemy even being considered, or as if making new tech was a Denial of Service against the Priests who need to review every Miracle and Revelation for sanctified inclusion within the Cannon. Or whatever.

I formed my thoughts into a deliberately indirect dissection of this, and now I repost here:

Thanks for your input! I hadn't realized my post had made it to the subreddit since it was immediately removed, so it slipped my mind. Anyway, it's not really related to what you said, but I'll take your remarks as a starting point to have a riff / use as springboard for a thought that's been brewing:

Hearing you say that seasoned cryptographers wouldn't even bat an eye at this surprised me. I'd thought those well-versed in this domain could glance at an idea, scan the smhasher results, and almost intuitively know whether there's potential there or not. I imagined they'd have a sort of gut feeling, something like "this holds promise" or "this won't cut it," directing their decision to delve further. So, why is it such a challenge for non-experts to make substantial contributions? It seems as though there's an unspoken rule prohibiting it.

I suppose this isn't unique to cryptography; it probably exists in any specialized field, like bioinformatics. Yet, there's a distinction - when an outsider steps into a bioinformatics forum with innovative ideas and some groundwork, they're likely to find a receptive audience.

But with cryptography, it feels closed off. It's as if only certain individuals are permitted to work on specific topics within established parameters, and only an elite few are qualified to assess this work. It's reminiscent of religious doctrine where deviation is considered heresy and swiftly dismissed. This leads me to question who's guiding the crypto field to limit creative contributions and why? Who stands to benefit from curbing the development of new algorithms and preventing their widespread adoption? Who might be disadvantaged by a sudden surge of new, potentially powerful crypto algorithms?

It's a challenging balance to strike. Personally, I think the current system could be improved. As an impartial observer with no stake in the outcome, I see this as an intriguing creative outlet. I'm not advocating for a revolution and frankly, I'm not particularly concerned if things stay as they are. However, I do believe that when a field becomes too closed, we all stand to lose.

Here's the intriguing part: while the field is theoretically open, in practice, it mimics a closed one, similar I suppose to the restrictions and veil of esoterica surrounding nuclear technology. But nobody openly discusses this closed-off nature, which only adds to the strangeness.

I understand why it's structured this way, but I can't help thinking there could be a better approach. Given the diverse interests involved, it's challenging to identify what that might be. Surely, I can't be alone in thinking this way, right?

1: https://dosyago.github.io/rain/

msla3• 3 years ago

The problem with developing your own cryptography is that it's easy to make something you can't crack but which has holes an experienced cryptographer could drive a bus through. A false sense of security is worse than no security at all. Plus, of course, most people who claim to have a Bold New Encryption Algorithm are selling the absolute worst kind of snakeoil, like XORing the input with a single fixed-length key over and over again, because they know most of their victims will be even less knowledgeable than they are. The outright frauds poison the make-your-own cryptography field for the honest ignoramuses.

The field isn't closed off, either. It's just founded on mathematics that's beyond what the average untrained or semi-trained person reaches, especially the ones who feel entitled have Big Opinions on the subject. However, if some can't grasp the mathematical underpinnings of contemporary cryptography, their opinions of how cryptography ought to be done are worth less than nothing. Mathematics isn't a democracy, ignorance doesn't get a vote.

tialaramex2• 3 years ago

We don't need very much of this work.

Unlike in many fields, there is no value in a cheap local substitute for cryptographic algorithms. Indeed vanity ciphers (many smaller powers wanted their own symmetric ciphers for national pride reasons) fell out of favour because they're just worse in practice.

So the competition for your Cryptographic hash isn't some idea by a guy from the next town, it's SHA-512/256 and maybe SHA-3.

Try something else, should the US Government have a department which vets architectural plans for a new Capitol building. Sure, the US Capitol is a pre-civil war building, and there's no reason it would be torn down and rebuilt or replaced as a whole, but surely it's unfair to just have one dead guy get to design the Capitol when who knows, Suzy, a ten year old from Maryland, who has no architectural training and mostly just thinks everything should have ponies on it, might have a better design? Why are there so many Gatekeepers? Suzy's design for the Capitol might be great, it's unfair that she's not considered just because she isn't an expert and they don't need a new one designed.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

With all due respect, in appears your basis for believing this was submitting to Reddit. Ten minutes of web search seems to indicate you're a guy from Australia who ten years ago was listed on LinkedIn as an unemployed "Hardcore Programmer" looking for work in Hong Kong, then at some point you started a company called Irrzl, LLC that aimed to create a "post-scarcity, space-traveling human population with arbitrarily extended lifespans." In order to fund your own research, you started businesses selling "trade-secret algorithms" while anonymously employing arbitrary people who had no salaries but could request to be paid whatever they wanted on a weekly basis, and now you have some other company Dosyago Corp with an address in Beaverton, OR that is a strip mall with a mail scanning service where you can have mail sent to you without revealing your actual location, so it isn't a real business address.

I really don't want to come across as mean, and I know what your response will be already, but everything a person can find out about you within a few minutes screams crank. You come here wondering why all these gatekeeper mathematicians in their cathedrals won't take you seriously, but it doesn't appear all that mysterious to me. You may very well be what you say you are. You'll live forever and colonize the galaxy, and along the way, also provide better cryptographic hashing functions. But you have to clear some kind of minimum bar for why a person should even look at your work. Most of these mathematicians are presumably not thinking they're going to live forever, so they only have so much time to spend considering everything a person on the Internet thinks they should consider. Whatever heuristic they're using may be as imperfect as Goldman Sachs throwing away any unsolicited resume that doesn't show an Ivy league degree, but they need some kind of heuristic.

dang• 3 years ago

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34451250 - Jan 2023 (9 comments)

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086917 - Aug 2021 (15 comments)

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 - Dec 2015 (93 comments)

klabb33• 3 years ago

Agree with the general point. It’s one of few subfields which is about reducing “interop”, or what is allowed to be done within a system. Auth(n,z) are also in that domain, yet perhaps not academic fields in their own right.

Interestingly, this is also true for DRM, which is also political but does not protect individuals, generally. So restricting what “can be done” as a political expression depends on the “for who?”, even if the tech itself is inanimate and neutral.

PerryCox• 3 years ago

This is a very realistic take on the subject. From an academic perspective it is a tool to be used as any other and gaining knowledge on how to better protect data is worthwhile and provides value to humanity as a whole.

DRM is one use that does not favor consumers, on the other hand we have encryption being used in apps like Signal to provide the same high quality software to every day consumers.

I'm very interested in quantum computers, specifically ones powerful enough to break AES and other types of modern encryption. What will that mean for humanity and individuals?

thiagoharry• 3 years ago

As far as I know, there are no known quantum attacks that break the security of AES. It is unknown if they are able to turn AES insecure, like they do to RSA and discrete logarithm problems. And there are several post-quantum candidate alternatives to replace RSA and crypto algorithms that would break under quantum attacks.

Quantum computers break several security assumptions. But not all of them and we usually can replace the broken assumptions. Discovering that P=NP, or that one-way functions do not exist, on the other hand, would imply that several secure cryptographic constructions that we want to use are in fact impossible and would be a much scarier discovery.

matheusmoreira3• 3 years ago

Remote attestation is another example of cryptography favoring corporations at our expense. It provides cryptographic proof to corporations that their user hostile software has not been defeated or otherwise tampered with.

klabb33• 3 years ago

Yes I should maybe have included it. But to me, that just seems like newspeak for DRM that poses as security.

ntrebius• 3 years ago

Don't forget that you can also remotely attest a server... in which case you can get guarantees on how a corporation is manipulating your data. For instance, you could make sure that your data is reasonably secured and not shared with third parties. So I don't believe remote attestation in itself favors corporation, it really depends on how and where you make use of it.

Sadly the adoption of "trusted computing" on the server side has been slower than expected. Maybe because of lack of user pressure? Also my guess is that most companies prefer not to be too transparent regarding how they process our data...

dirkc2• 3 years ago

even if the tech itself is inanimate and neutral

I've come to believe that no tech is neutral. Some tech allows more variety in the politics surrounding it, while other tech has a very narrow range or politics - like DRM.

hiatus• 3 years ago

Interesting, could you expand on your view about the range of politics afforded by technologies? Specifically, your mention of DRM was intriguing. While I personally dislike DRM applied to consumer devices and content, I think there are applications of digital rights that are less objectionable, like ensuring the integrity of medical device firmware deployed in a hospital.

BSEdlMMldESB• 3 years ago

but is DRM a 'technology' or is it something more specific?

if computers are a technology, then DRM is an specific application of it???

ugh, I just destroyed my own understanding

Nasrudith• 3 years ago

I've come to a view that is an antonym personally whose difference is oddly semantic. The tech is neutral in itself but people can make absolutely anything political. There are no real constraints on sanity. They can make needing to eat and drink to survive political because admitting the obvious contradicts 'great leader'.

klabb33• 3 years ago

Yes you could put it that way. A sorting algorithm has very little impact on politics whereas say fingerprinting or encryption can be leveraged for political purposes.

DRM (and it’s hipster cousin “remote attestation”) stands out as being exceptionally political because it relies on the hardware to be controlled by a different actor than its owner and operator. Similar to “tamper-proof” physical objects, from the old days.

hackermatic• 3 years ago

This and "Security Engineering as Caring-For" [0] have been the guideposts in my security career, helping me think about what I should work on (or not) and reminding me why I keep working on bad days.

Essays like these aren't just moral admonishments; they offer a way to find deeper meaning in your work or figure out what work would have meaning for you. Personally and politically, there can be so much more to your tech career than just "puzzles and math."

[0] https://noncombatant.org/2016/03/27/security-as-caring-for/

jryio• 3 years ago

Rogaway was my professor of cryptography at Davis. Amongst his peers he focuses strongly on the ethics of his work, noticing and calling attention to ethical failings by students and professors alike, as well as mentoring students for their future careers.

He also teaches a call called "Ethics in an age of technology". The reading list is that of a philosophy professor rather than a cryptographer. I could not more highly recommend engaging with this surprisingly "unrelated" material.

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring23/

Rogaway challenged us in small group settings to explore not the implications of computers and the internet, but if technology itself on humanity. I.e the automobile, industrialization, printing press, etc.

Thank you Phil, you've changed my life for the better

jrexilius• 3 years ago

Sounds like a great professor. "Think about what you are doing" is probably good advice for any discipline.

sifar• 3 years ago

Ellul's The Techonological Society should be on that reading list. I have found it to be a thorough analysis of what technology is and it's impact on society and individual.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

Cypherpunk-styled creations — think of Bitcoin, PGP, Tor, and WikiLeaks—were to be transformative because they challenge authority and address basic freedoms: freedom of speech, movement, and economic engagement.

I know it's not a widely accepted view on HN but you shouldn't downvote just because you hate cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ethereum (Ethereum which has switched to proof-of-stake, now consuming a negligible amount of energy) are actually two semi-successes of the cypherpunks. They were created as challenges to authority and released as free for anyone to use.

What happened next is open for discussion but I don't think the intentions were bad.

c_crank• 3 years ago

The intentions were not malicious, but they were poorly thought out. The way these coins either trend towards matching stock market trends or going to zero was inevitable based on their design.

trinsic2• 3 years ago

I reject the idea of crypto currencies in its current form because it only offers an illusion of freedom from a corrupt fractional reserve financial system. The systems that are built on top of of this infrastructure, at its roots, attempts to turn everything into a commodity. It's an inherently flawed principle and I think many people that frequent HN are smart enough to see that.

sramsay• 3 years ago

I take a more skeptical view of the relationship between politics and technology (not specifically on cryptography, though I think my point stands in this context) in a recent (scholarly) article:

https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000690/000690.htm...

Abstract: A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,”[Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

motohagiography• 3 years ago

While I am not a professor, apparently I get to say I was cryptographer according to this paper (albeit accidentally). Normal software developers take on pressure to manage technical debt, where engineers are pressured to reduce costs against safety and reliability. In finance, they get pressure to fudge models to hide risk. In security and cryptography, the pressure is the ethical pressure to be the one who takes the shortcut only you and your business sponsor undersand, which weakens the scheme in favour of some other economic purpose, or worse a political one.

To work professionally in privacy and cryptography is adversarial to the point of being gladiatorial, where there are very serious (and sometimes dangerous) interests involved. This work is not for the meek.

The moral aspect of it is that you need a belief in truth and the value of personal integrity that would sabotage most other careers. When you design security protocols, you are engaged in governance by other means. With real government and the economy using the internet as its substrate, using math and technical reasoning to moderate their more extreme urges is a kind of moral responsibility. Not to pontificate too much, but when I was a kid wanting to become a hacker, it was because it represented a way to be an ethical steward operating outside these systems. Not a gatekeeper or spoiler, but someone whose skills maintain a balance. In a career as a hacker working on these problems in govt, I did good work that I think has kept some specific totalitarian urges in check, by depriving them of the certainty and impunity an abuser requires. I tell younger people working in Privacy in govt that it is the only place in the public sector where demonstrating courage is the job.

This is a great paper, and almost a decade later I would observe that if you want to really make a difference in the world where you can secure the freedom for yourself and others to really flourish and be a benefit to humanity, finding ways to practice the triad of math, courage, and compassion together is the indomitable x-factor. Each without the other are useless, but the person using them together is often history's most decisive actor, imo.

The moral character of cryptographic work (2015)

Related Stories