Cryptography May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support

Re:Cryptography May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support by ds9 on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @01:16PM (#7097094)

Cryptography is alive and well, but not because we can redefine the goals to disregard the most powerful adversaries. It's alive and well because there are ciphers that remain essentially unbreakable and are likely to remain so in the forseeable future.

The title is somewhere between misleading and dishonest. It's like saying that door locks are "dead" because burglars can go in the windows - in reality there's nothing wrong with the door locks, and the correct response is not to abandon the door locks but instead to secure the windows too (no pun intended).

The fact that there are side attacks is not a flaw of cryptography, rather it is a part of the environment in which it is practiced, and besides the attackers' workarounds are in principle subject to being defeated or avoided.

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Re:Cryptography May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support by chris_mahan on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @01:59PM (#7097409)

One does not need to break the cyphers if one can obtain the decryption key, either by locating them, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" them out of biological systems.

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Re:Cryptography May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support by mpyne on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @02:11PM (#7097497)

Neither of which enable mass surveillance though, which is the major threat from what I can tell. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis has been possible since the Caesar cipher.

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Re:Cryptography May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support by chris_mahan on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @02:29PM (#7097633)

If there were hundreds of millions of sites to compromise, I agree. But if one obtains, and keeps obtaining, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo private certificates, then one can access the private information of billions of people.

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