[3074] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: practical encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold G. Reinhold)
Fri Jul 24 19:06:13 1998
In-Reply-To: <199807241347.AA29244@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 18:18:37 -0400
To: Dan Geer <geer@world.std.com>
From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
> People don't want to know how this stuff works.
>
>In a famous and subtantiated finding, Tversky & Kahneman
>showed that people tend to regard propositions that they
>do not understand as more risky, regardless of their
>intrinsic risk, and to regard things they do understand
>as less risky, again without regard to intrinsic risk. **
>
>This presumably drives the crypto community's dilemma
>in affecting public taste w.r.t. tradeoffs of freedom
>versus security.
>
>--dan
>
>
>** Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Judgment Under Uncertainty:
>Heuristics and Biases," Science [185] 1974, pp. 1124-1131.
One way to demystify cryptography for the general public is to teach it in
elementary programming courses. Large numbers of people are taught
programming at some point in their education.
For some time now, I have been pushing Ciphersabe, a simple ciphering
scheme that uses RC4. See <http://ciphersaber.gurus.com> Several people
have expressed interest in using Ciphersaber as an exercise in the courses
they teach. I think it is simple enough to be taught at the high school
level, yet it brings many of the important issues in cryptography to light.
It also provides a vehicle for discussing ethical issues in computer
science.
If you teach entry level computer science and want to make the world safe
for strong crypto, consider including this material in your course.
Arnold Reinhold
