Evervault Papers

Crypto means cryptography

The most important cryptography papers spanning the past, present, and future of cryptosystems & cryptology.

Non-Malleable Cryptography

Danny Dolev, Cynthia Dwork, & Moni Naor

On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs

Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, Rusell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan, & Ke Yang

Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups

David L. Chaum

A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function

Ralph C. Merkle

The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems

Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, & Charles Rackoffero

Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security

Matt Blaze, Whiteld Diffie, Ronald L. Rivest, Bruce Schneier, Tsutomu Shimomura, Eric Thompson, & Michael Wiener

Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security

Matt Blaze, Whiteld Diffie, Ronald L. Rivest, Bruce Schneier, Tsutomu Shimomura, Eric Thompson, & Michael Wiener — Published January 1996

The strength of cryptography lies in the choice and management of the encryption keys.

While mainly of historical interest, this paper, by "an ad hoc group of cryptographers and computer scientists", shows that longer keys will resist attack better than shorter keys, that the cost of very strong encryption is not significantly greater than that of weak encryption, and that it is prudent to require that encrypted data should still be secure in 20 years.

The sizes of encryption keys are measured in bits and the difficulty of trying all possible keys grows exponentially with the number of bits used. Adding one bit to the key doubles the number of possible keys, adding ten increases it by a factor of more than a thousand.”

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