A Brief History of Cryptography

[Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com>]

[ I'm not on the list.  Replies cc'ed to me.  Public domain ]

Once upon a time, the average citizen did not have access to locks.
The U.S. Government had locks, and agencies to control them: the FBL,
the CLA, and the NLA.  They even knew that other governments had
locks, but they also knew that those governments denied locks to their
citizens, so the whole lock business was cartelized.

However, the need for locks could not be denied, so the NLA was
chartered to create locks for U.S. citizens.  It created a lock, but
didn't explain how the lock worked.  Some people showed that the lock
might be pickable by the NLA, although they couldn't pick it
themselves.  Some people thought that the extra wards in the lock were
there to give the NLA a master key.  But none of it could be proved,
so people used the standard lock.

As the society got wealthier, people had more things they needed to
lock up.  This created more incentive for lock creation, and citizens
started to invent them.  Some locks were sham locks and could be
picked with a hairpin, or a skeleton key.  Other locks were
understandably difficult to pick, and came to be preferred to the
NLA-approved standard lock.

The NLA (and FBL and CLA) feared these locks that they hadn't devised
and probably couldn't pick.  So they proposed a scheme whereby they
would create a new standard lock, which had an explicit master key.
Naturally, this was viewed as a step backwards by people used to the
standard lock, which they believed couldn't be opened by anyone but
the key-holder.  This lock design was opposed by nearly everyone.

So they proposed a new lock standard, whereby everyone had to have a
copy of their key registered with the NLA.  This also was perceived as
unworkable for the same reason as the master key system.

In the meantime, of course, people were using these new
citizen-created locks, which were widely thought to be strong.  They
expected no less of the NLA lock design, particularly since the NLA
standard lock has been proven to be pickable.

How will this story end?  No one knows yet.  Will the NLA seek to ban
strong locks?  Or will the NLA lose all its control over citizen
locking?  Time will tell....

-- 
-russ <nelson@crynwr.com>    http://www.crynwr.com/~nelson
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