Crypto Standards

Concerning The Impact of Cryptographic Policies & Standards On Future Technologies

By Roy D. Follendore III

July 9, 2003

Like artists contemplating their efforts, cryptographers must take time to step back and see what we have done in order to understand what has been accomplished and think about what should be done next. Unless you have done this kind of work from beginning to end, the average person has no sense of the idea that cryptography as a body of knowledge is a flow. Like a gentle spring mountain rain, it arises from incoherent inconsequential points of reference and eventually comes together becomes a ponderous and powerful flow of force that must be reckoned with. Cryptography does not just concern randomizations of numbers, or permutations of calculations. Cryptography is about the endlessly recombining relationships and organizations of flawed human beings. As complex as cryptography might be, it is more than matched by the complexity of the people it served. It is simply not enough to say that cryptography is a powerful tool for individuals.

Far more powerful than that, cryptography concerns the very profound human perspective that immense strength arises from highly coordinated intellectual control of social systems. This means that secrecy is not the purpose of cryptography. The ability to assure that certain knowledge remains in existence, that useful knowledge will get through ones own dangerously complex and competitive networks and that it will get there without fundamentally changing its original intent is the purposes of cryptography. In this way, cryptography has been really about the way in which social mankind can be rearranged in systems that work together. When cryptography was being invented this was as it still is a revolution in thinking. It is revolutionary because it attacks and demolishes the ancient ideal of social man as a mechanical structure. Through the black magic of cryptography, within the stroke of technology, old mechanistic relationships of that faith in the set arrangements man as a functional social machine became the profound belief in man coordinated through the control of rational logic. The organization of man could become true to its organic nature.

But the awareness of the power of cryptography is well known. Writers write about this aspect of cryptography throughout its history. Power is the principle part of the mystique which initially draws intellectuals to this subject. Future technical historians arrive at the foot of the philosophy of cryptography with the idea that as a body of engineering it has everything to do with function and form, and no more. Some believe that cryptography can be ignored as a instinctual natural process and that cryptography can ignored as an instinctual creative process. These people are inclined to believe that cryptography can be ignored as a source of great energy that represents the resonating social changes to which modern man has been translated. They come to cryptography with the mindset that the notion of technology can be intellectually separated from its function and for this reason they produce answers that are wrong. In the eyes of modern technologists, cryptography is conceived of as a machine, a machine fundamentally different from the men that employ it. In spit of this 'purest view,' there remains a synergy of cryptography that as a social consequence has been consistently ignored; and because of this the revolutionary nature of cryptography that has been ignored.

Where the implications of cryptography may have opened opportunities for social change through control of knowledge, the conception of what cryptography is has not been cracked. The academics of cryptography is thought of as an engineered form of mathematics, nothing more. Because of this, cryptography has been technically and mechanically managed without particular imagination, particularly with respect to future social and technical consequences and as a dangerous equation that should and must be controlled. I firmly believe that to date this has been the essential limiting fabric of cryptography.

With this in mind, in the Spring of 2003, I asked my Graduate Telecommunication cryptography class (TCOM-556) at George Mason University to write an essay about the impact of cryptographic policies and standards on new technologies. My teaching objective as their Professor was (1.) to give my students the opportunity to policies and standards to the expanding conception of cryptography, (2.) to provide students the opportunity to argue present to future conditional issues of the status quo, and (3.) to discover and contribute to the body of academic knowledge concerning the implications and justifications validating cryptographic policies and standards as they do and shall impact the future of new cryptographic technologies. I firmly believe that to teach the cryptographic engineering specifications without context and responsibilities of the cryptographic black arts is a problematic travesty of academic technical engineering philosophy.

There were several very good papers. I found that of these essays, the following was particularly exceptional. In my opinion, it is well worth reading. It is exceptional in another respect in that it was written by three scholarly women about an often male dominated engineering subject. It is therefore with their permission and great pleasure that I present "The Impact of Cryptographic Policies & Standards" by Taesam Ryu, Sudha Kode, and Michelle Kim.

Regards,

Roy D. Follendore III

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