Quotes & Sayings About Cryptography

A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography — Bruce Schneier

Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action. — Julian Assange

Bitcoin is designed around the idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities." (anonymous, — Michael Caughey

I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing. — Whitfield Diffie

This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms
translation: all your bank account are belong to us
— Charles Stross

I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists ... I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values. — Matt Blaze

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. — Edward Snowden

I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you'd be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist. — Mark O'Connell

The mantra of any good security engineer is: 'Security is a not a product, but a process.' It's more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it's designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together. — Bruce Schneier

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant. — James Sanborn

Cryptography products may be declared illegal, but the information will never be — Bruce Schneier

Cryptography is typically bypassed, not penetrated. — Adi Shamir

Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology. — Austin Grossman

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a
totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. — Peter Ludlow

Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design. — Jacob Appelbaum

Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about. — Whitfield Diffie

Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. — Austin Grossman

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl. — John Perry Barlow

The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann debacle was actually a failure of German cryptography. — Simon Singh

I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded. — James Sanborn

-How long do you want these messages to remain secret?[ ... ]
+I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil. — Neal Stephenson

Cryptography [without system integrity] is like investing in an armored car to carry money between a customer living in a cardboard box and a person doing business on a park bench. — Gene Spafford

He stopped, because he wasn't sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes. — Samuel R. Delany

One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem. — Jacob Appelbaum

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files. — Bruce Schneier

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA). — Vladimir Arnold

I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on." Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography. — Simon Singh

Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. — Julian Assange

Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography. — Glenn Greenwald

I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology. — Whitfield Diffie

Cryptography has generated number theory, algebraic geometry over finite fields, algebra, combinatorics and computers. — Vladimir Arnold

I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files. — Whitfield Diffie