Cryptography and Trust

No ratings

Presented at LondonCryptoDay 2017 by

The relationship between cryptography and trust has been discussed for several decades. From my point of view, there are still some aspects worthy of discussion today. In this talk, I will share some examples with the audience to demonstrate that without trust cryptography is useless, and discuss the different layers of trust necessary in a cryptographic system as it is designed and evaluated, implemented, adopted and used. A cryptographic system designed under certain trust assumptions will need to change if these trust assumptions are no longer valid. Of course, different people trust different things. Can the cryptographic community come up with suitable cryptographic solutions to meet different trust needs? How can we convince developers to adopt our designs and how can we help those who have different trust views from ours to benefit from cryptography? In the end, we must find a balance and be clear what we as the cryptographic community trust and who and what other people trust and we must respect the latter.