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*Economist* on encryption
The following is intended for limited-distribution, educational purposes
only....
Citation: The Economist, Sept 21, 1991 v320 n7725 p104(2)
COPYRIGHT Economist Newspaper Ltd. (UK) 1991
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Title: A cure for the common code: computer cryptography.
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Subjects: Public key cryptosystems_Standards
Digital signatures_Standards
Data encryption_Research
United States. National Institute of Standards and
Technology_Laws, regulations, etc.
Reference #: A11286848
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Summary: Advances in the mathematics of prime factorization algorithms
have led to a technology that, once standardized, will
dramatically improve public-key cryptography. The RSA
algorithm is popular in the computer industry, but the
government favors an alternative.
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ANYONE can sign a postcard, but how do you sign a piece of electronic
mail? Without a "signature" to demonstrate that, say, an electronic
transfer of funds really comes from someone authorised to make the
transfer, progress towards all-electronic commerce is stymied. Ways of
producing such signatures are available, thanks to the technology of
public-key cryptography. They will not work to everyone's best
advantage, though, until everyone uses the same public-key system. It
is an obvious opportunity for standards-makers - but in America they
have turned up their noses at all the variations on the theme
currently in use. The alternative standard for digital signatures now
offered by America's National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) has brought a long-simmering controversy back to the boil.
Public-key cryptography could become one of the most common
technologies of the information age, underpinning all sorts of routine
transactions. Not only does it promise to provide the digital
equivalent of a signature, it could also give users an electronic
envelope to keep private messages from prying eyes. The idea is to
create codes that have two related keys. In conventional cryptography
the sender and receiver share a single secret key; the sender uses it
to encode the message, the receiver to decode it. In public-key
techniques, each person has a pair of keys: a disclosed public key and
a secret private key. Messages encoded with the private key can only
be decoded with the corresponding public key, and vice versa. The
public keys are published like telephone numbers. The private keys are
secret.
With this technology, digital signatures are simple. Encode your
message, or just the name you sign it with, using your private key. If
the recipient can decode the message with your public key, he can be
confident it came from you. Sending a confidential message - putting
electronic mail in a tamper-proof envelope - is equally
straightforward. To send a secret to Alice encode it with her public
key. Only Alice (or someone else who knows her private key) will be
able to decode the message.
The heart of any system of public-key cryptography is a mathematical
function which takes in a message and a key, and puts out a code. This
function must be fairly quick and easy to use, so that putting things
into code does not take forever. It must be very hard to undo, so that
getting things out of code does take forever, unless the decoder has
the decoding key. Obviously, there must be no easy way to deduce the
private key from the public key.
Finding functions that meet these criteria is "a combination of
mathematics and muddle", according to Roger Needham of the Cambridge
Computer Laboratory. The greatest successes to arise from the muddle
so far are those using functions called prime factorisation
algorithms. They are based on the mathematical insight that, while it
is easy to multiply two numbers together, it is very hard to work
backwards to find the particular two numbers which were multiplied
together to produce some given number. If Alice chooses two large
prime numbers as her private key and publishes their 150-digit product
as her public key, it would probably take a code-breaker thousands of
years to work backwards to calculate her private keys. A variety of
schemes have been worked out which use this insight as the basis for a
workable public-key code.
Most popular of these is the so-called RSA algorithm, named after the
three MIT professors who created it - Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and
Len Adleman. It has been patented and is sold by a Silicon Valley
company, called RSA, that employs 15 people, most of them ex-MIT
graduate students. Faculty firms are to computer start-ups what family
firms were to the industrial revolution. RSA has attracted both
academic praise and a range of heavyweight commercial customers:
Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment and Lotus Development.
But, despite repeated applications, it has never been endorsed by
those in government.
Rumours abound that the code-breakers in the National Security Agency
have discouraged standard-setters from recommending RSA because they
do not want to promote the use of codes they cannot break. RSA, for
obvious reasons, does not discourage the rumours. Whatever the reason,
the standard-setters at the NIST have side-stepped the debate over RSA
with their new algorithm, DSA. As set out in the standard, DSA
verifies the identity of the sender, but does not encrypt the message.
It appends to the message a number calculated from the message and the
sender's private key. The recipient can then use this number, the
message and the sender's public key to verify that the message is what
it seems.
The NIST says that this technique is well suited to "smart cards" and
other applications where there is not a lot of computing power
available for working out codes. Because it hopes that DSA Will be
used for verifying the identity of everyone from welfare recipients to
military contractors, its flexibility is a boon. Meanwhile, however,
more and more companies are choosing a public-key cryptography system
for communicating confidentially - often RSA, sometimes something
different. Someday, probably soon, governments will want to choose,
too. Watch out for fireworks when they do.
------------------end forwarded article--------------------------
Russell Earl Whitaker [email protected]
Communications Editor [email protected]
EXTROPY: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought AMiX: RWHITAKER
Board member, Extropy Institute (ExI)
[.sig revised 1 October 1992 /// Send mail to eternity node]
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