Bit Commitment and Collisions

Matt Blaze wrote a blog post at the beginning of the year that does a most excellent job of detailing to the non-cryptogeek some of the difficulties inherent in one of the fundamental problems in security: establishing trust.

Two particularly well turned phrases from the post:

 ”It can be very difficult to convince even an expert in the field that a proposed protocol is secure and fair. I’m not aware of any such protocol that’s also easily understandable to a non-specialist. Arcane complexity is a regrettably common feature in modern cryptography.”

and

“The first requirement for a democratic election is that voters understand and have confidence in the outcome. The crypto-based voting systems proposed thus far by and large fail this test from the start. Voting, like psychic debunking, is first and last a human-scale problem.”

The longer you work in this field of IT, the more you ought to realize the truth: Most of the problems you tasked with trying to solve are not technology problems.  The technology problems you solve are symptoms, not root causes.  In the end, all IT projects are people projects.