The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

Date: December 2015



Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plead for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.

Note: This is a paper I wrote to accompany an invited talk at Asiacrypt 2015. It is not a standard research paper. The talk was delivered on December 2, 2015, in Auckland, New Zealand.

Reference: Phillip Rogaway: The moral character of cryptographic work. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2015/1162. 2015. Bibtex citation

Availability: You can download the

Paper with footnotes (if you like to read copious footnotes) or the

Paper with endnotes (if you don’t)

Also available:

Slides for the Asiacrypt talk (Dec 2, 2015) and the associated mp3 (Dec 2, 2015)

Slides for a related public lecture: Mass Surveillance and the Crisis of Social Responsibility (Dec 9, 2015)

Press and blog coverage: boingboing (Cory Doctorow) · Schneier on Security · The Atlantic (Kaveh Waddell) · tweet by Chris Soghoian · tweet by WikiLeaks · adactio (Jeremy Keith) · Guardian opinion (John Naughton) · Bristol blog · No cutesy adversaries (Jeff Burdges) · nine to noon (Kathryn Ryan) (audio) · YahooNZ-1 (video) and YahooNZ-2 (video) and YahooNZ-3 (video)

Note: A short book based on this paper is in preparation.



