Shamir: The Engineer, Builder and Tester of the Information Age — From Innovators to Cyber Punks, a…
Shamir: The Engineer, Builder and Tester of the Information Age — From Innovators to Cyber Punks, a New World Evolves
Introduction
I love cryptography, and believe that cryptography can help build a more trusted world. And many of things I touch in cryptography seem to have had the hands of Adi Shamir on them. He is a truly stunning academic and researcher, in that way that academics used to be.
Ever computer science student knows Shamir from the ‘S’ in the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Aldeman) method, but few perhaps know that he had a hand in creating many of the new methods that we currently use in creating trust within our infrastructures. It is thus Shamir’s work which will play a strong part in building the foundation of a distributed Internet — and this time it will be built correctly. Many of our existing problems with security — phishing, malware, Denial of Service — have been caused because the original building blocks were flawed, and we have not been able to fix them properly.
While the RSA is still going strong after more than 40 years, his foundation work on zero-knowledge proofs is still going strong, and is helping transactions to stay anonymise within a blockchain world.
His secret share methods, too, are now being used within blockchain transactions to define the trusted for the owners of keys, and where they must come back together in order to release the required secret keys on data.
His work on ring signatures is now showing great promise in cryptocurrency methods, and where many entities can group together, and where one entity can sign for the rest, and for it not to be possible to find the entity who actually signed the transaction, but for it still to be trusted.
His impact?
Just now I am writing a book on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and everywhere I look in cryptography, Shamir’s name crops up. This week I’m investigating ring signatures, and which can be used to anonymise a cryto-payment, and he is right there with the core paper:
How to leak a secret, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Yael Tauman, ASIACRYPT 2001. Volume 2248 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 552–565.
While I read the Wikipedia pages many times, I had to go back to the original paper, as hundreds of editors and authors have failed to properly define the methods that the original authors put in place.
When I look to zero-knowledge proofs — where information can be passed without actually revealing the original information — again it is Adi Shamir who created some of the best methods, and which are still being used as the basis of new implementations:
- Zero-knowledge proof (Fiat-Shamir). ZKP. Outlines zero-knowledge proof.
- Zero-knowledge proof (Feige-Fiat-Shamir). ZKP. Outlines zero-knowledge proof using the Feige-Fiat-Shamir method.
In commutative encryption, where we can use our encryption keys in any order that we like, he created a workable commutative encryption:
- Commutative Keys (with SRA — Shamir, Rivest and Aldeman). Comm.
And, in sharing secret’s securely, he was the great innovator the Shamir secret sharing method:
And, of course, he help create one of the greatest step forward in humanity, public key encryption:
- RSA. Simple RSA Calculation. This is a simple tutorial for RSA key generation.
The beauty and craft of the RSA method is as great as any of the great art works of the past. A method which tips the balance between society and the citizen, and where the rights of the citizen to privacy are respected at its core. Many governments like to see an end to the RSA method, and for it to be finally broken, as they wish to spy on their citizens (as they have done for thousands of years). For the first time in history, our citizens were truly free from their governments spying on their every thought and movement.
In his spare time, he also advanced differential cryptography, and which was responsible for cracking many of the proposed methods in cryptography.
His hand on the wheel
Everywhere I look for methods, it seems that Adi was the one who provided the motivation behind them or broke them, and he often showed the world that they had created was not quite a secure as they should have been. For example, in 1982, he broken the Knapsack public key method (at the time it was seen as being one of the main contenders for a public key method):
Back][ Theory] RSA is just one way of doing public key encryption. Merkle-hellman-knapsack is a good alternative where…asecuritysite.com
While while many methods have failed, the RSA method is still going strong, and is still used for the majority of digital certificates. His impact too is found in the commercial world, where, in 1983, he was a co-founder of RSA Data Security and which led to the creation of VeriSign.
From crypto foundations to crypto punks
This new information age our world will not be bricks and mortor that will provide the foundation of our information age, it will be the cryptography methods that Shamir helped create in the 1980s.
The crypto innovators of the 1980s, such as Shamir, led to the cypherpunks (derived from cipher and cyberpunk) of the 1990s, and it is now their legacy, though Bitcoin and blockchain, and is seeing another world being built. This thinking has led to the term of Crypto punks which are [here]…
… a new iteration or evolution of these previous cultures influenced by cryptography, blockchain technology, crypto economics, libertarianism, holographics, democratic socialism, and artificial intelligence. They are tasked with not only undoing the mistakes of previous generations, but also innovating and creating new ways of solving complex problems with advanced technology and solutions.
and:
… have a strong distrust for inherently flawed and corrupt systems. This why Crypto Punks value transparency, free speech, privacy, and decentralization. As well as arguably computer systems over human powered systems.
The roots of cyber punks goes back to the 1990s, though the thought-leadership of people like Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May and John Gilmore. There foundation was built by people such as Shamir, and where the cryptography principles of the 1980s were used to build new models of fiance, and which have since become our cryptocurrency infrastructure. But that has just been the first experiment, the best is yet to come.
Conclusions
Adi has, of course, been rewarded with many honours for his work, including receiving the A.M. Turing Award, and which is the highest award in computer science. But his impact goes deeper into society, and where his methods have helped secure the privacy of trillions of users on the Internet, and how helped protect them from scammers. Many countries of the world, too, would love to tempt him from his home country, but Israel is where his heart lies. In a world led by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and all of the other faceless companies, I take great pride in people such as Adi, and that it is people with pride and passion that make a difference.
Adi is one of the chief engineers of this new world, and in a few decades we will look back on his work, and our current work in blockchain and anonymisation, and identity it as the creation of the greatest machine that human-kind has ever created. We are making mistakes on the way, but we are fixing the machine as it runs — and which is not an easy task. Our world is changing, and some view it as the same old world of the past, just build as an electronic version, but other see it as a new way for putting every citizen at the core.
What do you believe in?
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