.NET Security and Cryptography

Caveat: Provability Issues

Every asymmetric algorithm is based on some trapdoor one-way function. This leads to a critically important question: How do we know for certain that a particular function is truly one-way? Just because nobody has publicly demonstrated a technique that allows the inverse function to be calculated quickly does not actually prove anything about the security of the algorithm. If somebody has quietly discovered a fast technique to compute the inverse function, he or she could be busily decrypting enormous amounts of ciphertext every day, and the public may never become aware of it. It may seem paranoid, but high on the list of suspicions are major governments, since they employ large numbers of brilliant mathematicians ...