When Cryptography Fails or Saves the Day: Insights from Dr. Orr Dunkelman's Lecture 🔐

Dr. Orr Dunkelman of Haifa University
Lecture at TCE Summer School 2013, July 25, 2013
When Cryptography is not the Answer (even when it is)

Since modern cryptography has emerged in the mid 70's, it developed a huge set of solutions to many of the security problems: from secure algorithms for communication, to identification of entities, from integrity assurance for programs, to methods for evaluating a function without revealing it.
Despite these advances, even the security challenges that were solved by cryptography are still affecting our everyday life: from using old and insecure algorithms, through key management issues, to problems in the interaction between the cryptography and the system where it resides.
In this talk we shall consider several examples of such issues, of the gaps between "what is already solved by cryptographers" and "what the security professionals see as unsolved (if not unsolvable)". We will try to isolate the sources for such problems, and look for the changes, both in the technical level and in the perception level, needed from both sides of the security equation (cryptographers and security professionals), to overcome these issues in the future.