Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Cryptography

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—— G Julius Caesar

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—— John F Kennedy

Introduction

Cryptography is where security engineering meets mathematics. It provides us with the tools that underlie most modern security protocols. It is probably the key enabling technology for protecting distributed systems, yet it is surprisingly hard to do right. As we've already seen in Chapter 3, 'Protocols', cryptography has often been used to protect the wrong things, or used to protect them in the wrong way. We'll see plenty more examples when we start looking in detail at real applications.

Unfortunately, the computer security and cryptology communities have drifted apart over the last 25 years. Security people don't always understand the available crypto tools, and crypto people don't always understand the real-world problems. There are a number of reasons for this, such as different professional backgrounds (computer science versus mathematics) and different research funding (governments have tried to promote computer security research while suppressing cryptography). It reminds me of a story told by a medical friend. While she was young, she worked for a few years in a country where, for economic reasons, they'd shortened their medical degrees and concentrated on producing specialists as quickly as possible. One day, a patient who'd had both kidneys removed and was awaiting a ...