A proper law

[Owen Lewis]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> [mailto:ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk]On Behalf Of David Hansen
> Sent: 06 March 2003 11:46
> To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> Subject: Re: A proper law
>
>
> On 6 Mar 2003 at 11:08, Brian Gladman wrote:
>
>
> As I understand it brute force attacks against Enigma would still
> have taken a vast amount of time on the computers of the time until
> relatively recently. Stories of covering the moon in computers in
> fact. The key was in being clever, not being intimidated by the big
> numbers and looking at the problem the other way round. This allowed
> the impressive sounding big numbers to be cut down to a size where
> even an electro-mechanical machine could scan the much smaller range
> of possibilities in a relatively short time.
>
> While this may hold no lessons at all for today I would not be so
> sure.

I agree with you. Much can be achieved both by refusing to be over-awed by a
problem and setting aside the received wisdom as to how such a problem can
be approached or that the problem cannot be solved.

Perhaps one example is the exciting work being done to prove that movement
faster than the speed of light occurs. It's hard to remember now that there
were once educated people who thought the movement faster than the speed of
sound would be impossible. Or, even earlier, that travel faster than 45 mph
would be impossible to sustain as the change in air pressure would cause the
suffocation of any who tried.
>
> > But I very much agree with your view that there is no evidence to
> > suggest that the availability of strong encryption is 'causing the sky
> > to fall in'. After seeking such evidence on a worlwide basis it seems
> > that we have only a very small number of cases where encryption has
> > even been an issue and fewer still where encryption has resulted in
> > law enforcement failures.

I am not at all sure how one might derive satisfactory evidence in this
regard. It seems self evident that encryption assists the maintenance of
secrecy in respect of any project in which it is employed. If this is so
then encryption similarly assists in a criminal project as it does in any
other. This returns us to the basic proposition that encryption is neither a
'good' nor a 'bad' thing but takes on itself the colouration of the purposes
for which it is employed.

However, the fact remains that for now the large majority of human
communications, criminal or otherwise, are conducted without the use of
encryption.

 Owen