Do you support the premise of cryptographic variety? If so, please join us. Write to: Dr. Gideon Samid [gideon.samid@case.edu] or to Gary
Professor Russell Impagliazzo says:
Blind acceptance of the existence of public key cryptosystems as a de facto complexity axiom is unwarranted.
Currently, all known secure public key cryptosystems are based on variants of RSA, Rabin, and Diffie-Hellman crypto- systems. If an efficient way of factoring integers and solving discrete logarithms became known, then not only would the popular public key cryptosystems be broken, but there would be no candidate for a secure public-key cryptosystem, or any real methodology for coming up with such a candidate.
There is no theoretical reason why factoring or discrete log should be intractable problems. Confidence that they are intractable is based on our ignorance of any good method for solving the problems after more than twenty years of intense research. However, the same twenty years have vastly improved number-theoretic algorithms, so there is no reason to suspect similar improvements do not lie ahead. This makes it impossible to pick parameters for public-key sizes that will be still secure in say 20 years. In fact, the earliest guess for such a parameter 20 years ago was recently broken. More speculatively, it has been recently shown how to solve both problems in the quantum computer model.
The existence of public-key cryptography is fragile at best.
A Personal View of Average-Case Complexity
Professor Russell Impagliazzo
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0114
An Advocacy Group Pointing Out the Risk of growing dependency on
the intractability of factorization, and modulus logarithms. If either
one of these "assumed hard" problems is cracked by our adversaries then
our civil order would collapse. The Internet would cease to be the
framework for commerce, communication, tele-commuting, and any and all
long-distance activities.
The wealth of newly proposed "hard problems" is not fielded because of
the cryptographic "Catch 22": They are not trusted
because they have not been a target of massive cryptanalysis. And they
have not been a target of massive cryptanalysis because they are not in
use...
Neither the free market, nor the academic environment are suitable to
increase the cryptographic variety. It will only happen through a
grass-root movement.
IACV: Proposed Plan of Action
The IACV should organize to raise money for the following activities:
The IACV would solicit funds from a variety of sources, but should not
be a government instrument, nor a corporate entity, but an association
owned by its growing rank and file.
We are in the organizing phase --
join us as a co-founder!