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Why it's cool to make codes

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Apr 2003 16:18 BST

Cryptographers -- it seems to me -- are an especially happy bunch of folks. Near the start of every RSA Security conference, when a panel of top cryptographers discusses the latest issues in the field, the first thing that strikes you is how much fun they are having.

This year's cryptographers' panel was as stellar as it gets, featuring Professors Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, two-thirds of the team that created the RSA algorithm, on the day The New York Times announced they were to receive this year's Turing Award for computing. Whit Diffie, inventor of public key cryptography was also there, and the moderator Bruce Schneier is no slouch either. Even the junior member of the panel, Paul Kocher, inventor of the SSL protocol, is a crypto star in his own right.

The most striking thing about the panel is the glimpse you get of good science. These guys are satisfied, absorbed in their work and enjoy sharing it.

But they have lots of other things going for them. Unlike some other branches of science, their field is still developing fast. Ground-breaking changes are round the corner, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you see that in a field like, say, geology (literally ground-breaking though that might sometimes be).

Less importantly for the true scientist, but even more unusually, they are in a field that is actually interesting to a sizable bunch of other people. Their session is always the best attended, and one question they were asked from an audience of thousands, was: "How do I become a cryptographer?" How many organic chemists get asked that kind of question?

Cryptography involves almost mystical power. It is making things so secret that no one else can read them; recovering secrets so deep that no-one else can find them.

And finally, they are working on stuff that actually makes a big difference to people's lives. It may not yet be doing all the things that these people envisage for it, but cryptography is everywhere.