Scientific research and a moral stand should go hand in hand

During the last few days, I found several references to a beautiful just-published paper, which I hope everybody reads: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, by Phillip Rogaway; Cryptology ePrint Report 2015/1162, published on December 1st this year. It is more an academic essay than most crypto-related papers, and a long one at that (46 pages, packed with references and anecdotal notes).

But it is surprisingly easy to read. I am sitting in front of my computer while my students work on their final exam, and I have got over half way through the text; earlier today I looked at the quick presentation (as this work was presented by Rogaway at the Asiacrypt 2015 as an invited talk), and just loved it.

Now, I know most of the people reading my blog have a moral stand on their work (after all, I expect most of you to be committed to Free Software just as I am, and that is a tremendous political statement). We are also more a practice community than an academic/scientific one. But many of us dwell on several projects and hold more than one hats in life through which we are defined.

This paper/essay is really clicking with me, and it deeply resonates with the justification I presented when I joined the Masters on Security Engineering and Information Technologies program which I’m halfway through. Computer security does not exist in a void, and does not exist just for itself. As professionals, we have a mission to fulfill in society, and that will then shape how society evolves.

So, I invite everybody to at least take a casual look at this paper. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and I hope it changes people’s hearts and career decisions.

Comments

Richard Grubb 2016-01-08 00:22:00

Till now I knew that page not

Till now I knew that page not found mean it might have some issue of disk spacing. Will try to reload next time if I get “page not found”.