The Secret History of Blocks | The Deathly Hallows of the Cypherpunks: Public Key Cryptography

In 1977, after Rivest and other three invented the RSA algorithm, in order to prevent the public dissemination of cryptography knowledge such as public key encryption, the NSA exhausted legislation, threatened academic publishers, and directly warned the three cryptographers. In this regard, the official NSA statement is: "Unrestricted public discussion of cryptography will cause real and fatal dangers, which will seriously weaken the government's ability to transmit intelligence, and will also seriously weaken the government's protection from hostile groups. Coveting the ability to protect information related to national security." GCHQ on the other side of the ocean even classifies encryption technology as a sophisticated weapon according to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, just to prevent the research and proliferation of encryption technology.

In the next two decades, the British and American governments and military tried to control the research and application of cryptography among the people all the time. And these efforts, together with the Watergate hacking incident that just passed in 1972, made the public's distrust of large central bodies gradually take root.

In 1993, Eric Hughes, one of the founders of the Cypherpunk movement, wrote in the Cypherpunk Manifesto, the programmatic document of the Cypherpunk movement, "In the electronic age, privacy is essential for an open society. Privacy It's different from secret. Privacy is something that someone doesn't want to make public. And secret, it's something that he doesn't want anyone to know. Privacy is a kind of power. It gives someone the right to decide what to make public and what not to make public." Official announcement Cypherpunks are the beginning of the movement to protect personal network privacy through cryptography. Just as soldiers use guns as weapons and writers use pens as weapons, the public key encryption algorithm is the most important weapon for cypherpunks. In the process of fighting for the public's right to privacy from large central bodies, the cypherpunks have harnessed the power of public-key cryptography to its fullest.

3.1 PGP - the invisibility cloak handed out by conservatives

The conservatives among the cypherpunks just want to keep the paper mail age in the Internet age. Under the protection of PGP, a person can become completely invisible to any large centrosome.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is the first open source email encryption software released to the public. The public key encryption system it uses is almost impossible to brute force even with the current technology.

In 1991, one of the first cypherpunks, Philip R. Zimmermann, released an email encryption software called PGP for free on the Internet. A few years before developing PGP, in Colorado in the 1980s, software engineer Philip worked as a full-time military policy analyst on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Program. The world situation was different then than it is now. Reagan was still in the White House, Brezhnev was still in the Kremlin, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) told citizens to be ready to evacuate at any time, and countless people feared that the world would fall into a brutal nuclear war. Millions of people marched in Central Park for peace. In the process of organizing the domestic peace movement, because he opposed the arms race and the Cold War, he demanded that the government close the nuclear test site. In 1984, Philip was arrested at the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Site. In court, he was astonished to find his email correspondence and call records exposed in front of the state apparatus. So in prison, he made up his mind to develop a free and open source email encryption software for all Internet users. After he was released from prison, he immediately developed PGP at home. Like most cypherpunks, he had no financial resources to support his life, nor did he have the help of any assistants during the development of PGP. In 1991, the first version of PGP was publicly released, and the government immediately stipulated that exporting products or products with public key algorithms is considered the same crime as privately exporting or buying and selling arms. Philip is not an idle person either. Taking advantage of the freedom of speech stipulated in the US Constitution, he exported the source code of PGP to all over the world through books. This move made the U.S. government quite dissatisfied, and launched a three-year criminal investigation against Philip, accusing Philip of violating U.S. password export laws. In the end, under the firm protection of Philip by many open source groups and users, in 1996, the US government had to withdraw the charges.

PGP uses the RSA public key encryption algorithm. Although there is no major innovation in technology, it is the first software that brings the public key encryption algorithm to the lives of ordinary people. With PGP, even the most powerful state apparatus on the planet, cracking the encrypted emails a teenager sends to classmates is tantamount to an impossible dream.

Unfortunately, although people using PGP are still spread all over the world, the proportion of Internet users is still very small. On the one hand, PGP focuses on protecting the privacy of Internet users from the government, and neglects to a certain extent the creation of a user-friendly UI; on the other hand, many Internet users do not realize that their privacy is always coveted by large central bodies Under the circumstances, they generally hold a wrong idea: "Since I log in to my QQ mailbox and ask for a password, aren't the emails I send encrypted?"

3.2 Assassination Politics - The Elder Wand of Radicals

The radical wing of the cypherpunks wants to extend the freedoms offered by the web into everyday life, and the means can be deadly.

Assassination Politics, an Assassination marketplace built by Jim Bell utilizing public key cryptography, technically no bounties are given out. In fact, in the name of "prophecy", Assassin who successfully performed the mission can receive a lot of rewards.

In August 1992, Bell, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came up with a terrifying idea that even Timothy May, the father of cypherpunk, thought a little too much. Bell came up with the concept of the Assassin's Market, an organization that would award a cash prize to someone who correctly "predicted" the death of a particular person.

In Bell's view, ordinary people are almost helpless in the face of the invasion of powerful large centrosomes, so in this case, assassins are a legitimate form of self-defense. From this point of view, public key encryption is indeed like a weapon. If the system works as Bell imagines, the freedoms guaranteed by public-key cryptography on the web will extend to everyday life. At that time, the large-scale central body will be a vegetarian, and the corrupt employees will be in danger. Exorbitant taxes will be imposed, and the large-scale central body will greatly restrain their violations of civil liberties. War will also cease to exist, society will develop steadily and freely in self-government, and the world will open a new and beautiful new chapter.

At the heart of Bell's Assassin Pridik system is a wish list, which consists of two columns. One column contains the name of the person whose death the donor wishes to see news of, and the other column contains the "donations" that have been accumulated under that name. There are also two types of participants in this system, one is ordinary donors, who will put "donations" under the names of people they are willing to see the news of death; If the "prophecy" is confirmed, then he will get all the "donations" under the name of the target. In addition, in order to prevent the "prophet" from actually not having the ability to "predict", but hoping to guess the date correctly, the "predictor" must pay a certain amount of "anonymous payment token", which must make Random guessing becomes uneconomical.

In Bell's view, through the mechanism he designed, the absolutely unbreakable public key encryption technology makes the de facto "assassin for hire" completely legal.

The process by which "forecasters" participate in this system is divided into two parts. First, the "forecaster" sends an email to the organization, and the entire email is encrypted with the organization's public key, which means that only the organization with the private key can decrypt it. However, at this stage, the organization can only decrypt part of the content - the anonymous payment tokens contained in this email, and these anonymous payment tokens will be regarded as earnest money that the "prophet" is not a random guess. As for the other part of the email, its content is the details of the "prophecy", that is, the date of death of the target's name, which is encrypted by the public key of the "forecaster", and can only be decrypted by the private key of the "forecaster". The public key of the "forecaster" is not known. In this way, organizations can decipher the outer envelope and find the anonymous payment token, but they don't know what is predicted in the innermost envelope, neither the name nor the date.

In the second stage of the whole process, at this time, the death of a certain important person should have been released through various media. That is, the "prediction" of the "forecaster" has become a reality. The forecaster sends the organization another encrypted "envelope" containing the private and public keys of the previous "forecast" envelope, and a new public key for encrypting the anonymous payment token used as a reward (for emphasis Show the operation process before and after the realization of the "prophecy", the process of encrypting rewards is omitted in the schematic diagram). The organization will use the newly obtained private key to decrypt the "prediction" content of the "forecaster", and when the organization confirms that its date and target "prediction" is correct, the "forecaster" is entitled to receive rewards.

In Bell's ten papers on Assassin Pridik, quotation marks are placed around each word 'predictor'. After all, "the best way to make a prophecy come true is to carry it out". According to Bell, this system has at least three advantages over traditional hired murder.

First, it completely hides the identity of the "forecaster", which makes it unnecessary for any potential "forecaster" to reveal his name or location. Second, it allows the "forecaster" to make a "prediction" without revealing the actual content of the "prediction", which ensures that his "target" is unlikely to receive early warning of his intentions (and that a failed "prediction" is never need to be disclosed). In fact, he never had to reveal his predictions unless he wanted to win. Third, it allows the "forecaster" to anonymously award his reward to anyone else he chooses, since he can give this anonymous payment token to anyone without worrying that it will be traced. All the while, the "predictor" and the murderer are not physically connected because of the system, even though it is logically possible.

With the application of anonymous payment tokens, Bell's crazy idea has even become a reality. Founded in 2013 by a Crypto-Anarchist, the first practical Assassin Pridik system. It uses Bell's theory to accept donations and send rewards for those who "predict" success, it uses the dark web created by cypherpunk Dimson May to hide its physical location, and it uses BTC invented by Satoshi Nakamoto as Anonymous electronic cash maintains its incentive system. During the period when the website was available, famous public figures such as former US President Barack Obama and economist Bernanke were listed on its wish list. Its original dark web URL is assmkedzgorodn7o.onion, but after 2015, we cannot access it even with the Tor browser. But what is certain is that the website that inherits Bell's thought and carries out the death "prophecy" service still exists somewhere on the dark web.

3.3 Escrow Encryption Standard (EES) - the resurrection stone of large centrosomes

Since the spread of public key cryptography cannot be prevented, it is better to try to dominate it. ——White House 1993.4

The Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hallows in the Harry Potter series, has the power to resurrect the dead. However, after the user uses the Resurrection Stone, the dead will be resurrected in a form between soul and entity, against the user's wishes. , the user will be mentally tortured after resurrecting the dead.

In an effort to restore its own privilege of listening in on citizens' communications, the federal government enacted the Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES), which covers all encryption processors on the market collectively known as "Clipper chips." It is designed to enable encrypted telecommunications, especially voice transmissions on mobile phones. The core function of this standard is not to protect the communication security of the public, but the eavesdropping backdoor built into the chip.

The basic functionality of the EES system is simple in theory: When two devices establish a secure connection, law enforcement agencies still have the keys used to decrypt encrypted data. Communications are protected, but the FBI can still read the encrypted emails or listen to the correspondent's calls if they want to.

To make a secure phone call, the two phones will first establish a so-called session key to encrypt the conversation. The session key can unlock the ciphertext and reveal the plaintext. This key is given in advance. So the NSA just needs to find a way to make the "backdoor key" available to law enforcement without compromising the phone's security. They keep a copy of the session key for this. The session key will be encrypted using a key burned on the encryption chip, which is called the "unit key". When the "Clipper chip" is manufactured, the unit key is burned into the chip and cannot be changed. The cell key is held jointly by the FBI and the NSA, so that if both agencies feel the need to investigate a particular communication, they have the ability to call up a backup key that can break encrypted messages. In the White House's view, ESS not only provides Americans with secure telecommunications services, but also allows law enforcement agencies to easily eavesdrop if necessary.

Cypherpunks are furious that a government is allowed to hold copies of all keys. "Does it mean that with this chip, Hitler and Himmler can use the 'unit key' to determine who the Jews communicate with, so as to ensure that they can be exterminated?" Dimson May, the father of cypherpunk, questioned .

In 1994, Cypherpunk Blaze cast a death curse on the EES. Brights works for AT&T, one of the suppliers of the "Clipper chip." Taking advantage of his position, he discovered some flaws in the "Clipper chip" that made the "unit key" quite vulnerable to tampering. He published his findings in a famous paper in August 1994. In this way, as long as the cypherpunks rewrite the "unit key", the "card breaker" can only encrypt calls. The EES's revival of federal government surveillance privileges didn't last long, and the entire project didn't last until Christmas 1994 when it was axed. Not only that, the EES incident also left other evil consequences.

The federal government's efforts to revive the right to monitor people's privacy are tantamount to a blockbuster thrown at the cypherpunk circle. When we look back on this period of history afterwards, we can even think that EES is an important opportunity that the cypherpunk movement has been waiting for. The federal government's knife for self-destruction.

Like many other genius creations of the cypherpunks, public key cryptography has penetrated into our everyday lives.

When an application publisher publishes a program, it must digitally sign the application it releases. In this way, when a user installs the program on a mobile phone or computer, the device will automatically detect whether the program is actually issued by the application publisher. In this way, some people with ulterior motives can be prevented from implanting malicious codes in the program installation package.

Due to some reasons, some nouns in this article are not very accurate, mainly such as: general certificate, digital certificate, digital currency, currency, token, crowdsale, etc. If readers have any questions, they can call or write to discuss together.

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