bibliography: Celebrating the 30th anniversary of PKC

05 February 2012

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"One often hears recommendations for key-sizes of public-key cryptosystems needed to obtain security for 30 years and even 50 years. Anyone wanting a real security of this magnitude should probably take the construction of the quantum computer into consideration."

ECRYPT, “D.PROVI.3 – First Summary Report on Unconditionally Secure Protocols”, January 2005

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“In the next five years we will counter many 'hacker' attacks but we will not be safe from Nation States and other large entities”

Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), "We need assurance!", 1999-2008

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“Assurance is best addressed during the initial design and engineering of security systems, NOT as an after market patch. The earlier you include a security architect in your design process, the greater the likely hood of a successful and robust design. As the quip goes, he who gets to the (module) interface first wins.”

Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), "We need Assurance", AusCERT 2008

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bibliography: Celebrating the 30th anniversary of PKC

Authors:	Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Jim Bidzos, Ray Ozzie, Dan Boneh, Brian Snow
Organisation:
Date:	Oct 26, 2006
Keywords:	asymmetric cryptography, quantum computers, symmetric cryptography
Electronic Publications:	http://www.computerhistory.org/events/PKC/ http://www.voltage.com/PKC/ Full video recording of the event Full audio recording of the event
Abstract:
Quote:	Dan: Now Wit, how the heck did you start thinking what led to what we are celebrating here today? Whitfield: It turns on three things. In 1965 my friend Bill Man mistakenly told me that NSA encrypted the telephones within it's own building. They ran them in shielded conduits. The fact is that I was counter-culter, so anti-establishment, I could not understand the cryptography in which more than two people knew the key [ed: key translation centres, key distribution centres, Kerberos]. I never understood classical key distribution till much later. So I began thinking about that. ...
Quote:	Brian Snow: So the threat to cryptography is well understood due to work by Peter Shor and others. A symmetric algorithm like AES or others standard crypto processes is cut key-size in half, which is a dramatic reduction. It reduces AES on 128 to 64 bits, a DES equivalent, we don’t need it. So during the AES competition we put in an insurance policy, it was the right thing to do, because it had not yet been built and you have to take care of what you can think of in the long range future. If quantum computing came to be, they said put in a key size 256. We don’t need it now, its an absurd number, alright, but if quantum computing comes to be, it drops us to 128, a nice healthy number, still quite useable thank you, we can keep going and its no longer a threat. So it was a marvelous response to quantum computing. Now for key management purposes, against the RSA and the Diffie-Hellman and stuff, they flat-line under a quantum computer. It’s not just a cut the key size in half. So this becomes an invitation to the research community to get cracking lads. We need new algorithms that are robust at least to the square root factor under a quantum computer attack that can be used for non-repudiation, and public key processes. Open problem. Aching problem – work on it, please!
See:
Citation:	Voltage and RSA, “Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of PKC”, Oct 26 2006, http://www.computerhistory.org/events/PKC/ and http://www.voltage.com/PKC/
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Last Updated on Sunday, 04 January 2009 10:47

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