Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, 15th Anniversary Edition

6

Cryptography

Cryptography is pretty amazing. On one level, it's a bunch of complicated mathematics. It's cryptographers designing ever more complicated mathematical transformations and cryptanalysts countering with ever more ingenious ways of breaking the mathematics. It also has a long and proud history: confidants, lovers, secret societies, and governments have been using cryptography to protect their secrets for millennia.

On another level, cryptography is a core technology of cyberspace. It lets us take all of the business and social constructs we're used to in the physical world, and move them to cyberspace. It's the technology that lets us build security into cyberspace, to deal with the attacks and attackers discussed in Part 1. Without cryptography, e-commerce could never enter the mainstream. Cryptography is not a panacea—you need a lot more than cryptography to have security—but it is essential.

In order to understand security in cyberspace, you need to understand cryptography. You don't have to understand the math, but you have to understand its ramifications. You need to know what cryptography can do, and more importantly, what cryptography cannot do. You need to know how to think about cryptography in the context of computer and network security. These two chapters won't turn you into a cryptographer, only an intelligent consumer of cryptography.

To the consumer, cryptography is a shadowy protective entity—something like Batman—kind of menacing but on the side of ...