17.10.1. Academic research continues to increase
17.10.2. "What's the future of crypto?"
- Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. IBM didn't
think many computers would ever be sold, Western Union
passed on the chance to buy Bell's telephone patents. And
so on. The future is always cloudy, the past is always
clear and obvious.
- We'll know in 30 years which of our cypherpunkish and
cryptoanarchist predictions came to pass--and which didn't.
17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves
unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled.
("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics
(work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect
there are some links between knot theory and crypto.)
17.10.4. Game theory, reputations, crypto -- a lot to be done here
- a missing link, an area not covered in academic cryptology
research
- distributed trust models, collusion, cooperation,
evolutionary game theory, ecologies, systems
17.10.5. More advanced areas, newer approaches
+ some have suggested quasigroups, Latin squares, finite
automata, etc. Quasigroups are important in the IDEA
cipher, and in some DES work. (I won't speculate furher
about an area I no almost nothing about....I'd heard of
semigroups, but not quasigroups.)
- "The "Block Mixing Transform" technology which I have
been promoting on sci.crypt for much of this spring and
summer is a Latin square technology. (This was part of
my "Large Block DES" project, which eventually produced
the "Fenced DES" cipher as a possible DES
upgrade.)....Each of the equations in a Block Mixing
Transform is the equation for a Latin square. The
multiple equations in such a transform together represent
orthogonal Latin squares. [Terry Ritter, sci.crypt, 1994-
08-15]
+ But what about for public key uses? Here's something Perry
Metzger ran across:
- ""Finte Automata, Latin arrays, and Cryptography" by Tao
Renji, Institute of Software, Academia Sinica, Beijing.
This (as yet unpublished) paper covers several
fascinating topics, including some very fast public key
methods -- unfortunately in too little detail. Hopefully
a published version will appear soon..." [P.M.,
sci.crypt, 1994-08-14]
17.10.6. Comments on crypto state of the art today vs. what is likely
to be coming
- Perry Metzger comments on today's practical difficulties:
"...can the difference between "crypto can be transforming
when the technology matures" and "crypto is mature now" be
that unobvious?....One of the reasons I'm involved with the
IETF IPSP effort is because the crypto stuff has to be
transparent and ubiquitous before it is going to be truly
useful -- in its current form its just junk. Hopefully,
later versions of PGP will also interface well with the new
standards being developed for an integrated secure message
body type in MIME. (PGP also requires some sort of scalable
and reverse mapable keyid system -- the current keyids are
not going to allow key servers to scale in a distributed
manner.) Yes, I've seen the shell scripts and the rest, and
they really require too much effort for most people -- and
at best, once you have things set up, you can now securely
read some email at some sites. I know that for myself,
given that I read a large fraction of my mail while working
at clients, where I emphatically do not trust the hardware,
every encrypted message means great inconvenience,
regardless." [Perry Metzger, 1994-08-25]
By Tim May, see README
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