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Cracking the codes

Michael Kanellos and Charles Cooper CNET News.com

Published: 29 Apr 2004 12:15 BST

Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, came to prominence in the industry by breaking things.

In 1998, the company cracked security on smart cards by monitoring how much power their internal microprocessors used. Kocher also came up with the software inside Deep Crack, a machine tailored to crack encrypted documents.

Of course, he also fixes things. In the last few years, Kocher has emerged as one of the key technologists for financial companies and studios that are hoping to protect their intellectual property. He recently sat down with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com to discuss the ongoing melodramas surrounding privacy, piracy and stolen information.

Q: What is the top agenda issue for cryptography?
A: Let me tell you what it is not. The one thing that is stable -- and really, nobody should be spending too much time worrying about -- is which algorithms to use and what key sizes to use. Those are simple problems.

The huge challenge, from a technical perspective, is handling complexity, because we are getting systems that are just more and more complicated, and nobody knows how to get the bugs out.

The software side or hardware?
Software, hardware -- everything. You pick it, and it is a lot more complicated today than it used to be, whether it is your network, whether it is your individual PC, whether it is a device of some kind, whether it is your microprocessor. Nobody ever removes features; they only add them -- and from a security perspective, every legacy feature is a potential exposure.

If you have one component that you understand really well, it is pretty easy to get your hands around your one simple piece. But then you start having 600 components that all talk to each other. Not only do you have 600 times as many components to worry about, you have to worry about all of the interactions between these things.