Cryptography Guru Martin Hellman Urges International Cooperation on AI, Security

Martin Hellman "achieved legendary status as co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman public key exchange algorithm, a breakthrough in software and computer cryptography," notes a new interview in InfoWorld.

Nine years after winning the Turing award, the 78-year-old cryptologist shared his perspective on some other issues: What do you think about the state of digital spying today?

Hellman: There's a need for greater international cooperation. How can we have true cyber security when nations are planning — and implementing — cyber attacks on one another? How can we ensure that AI is used only for good when nations are building it into their weapons systems? Then, there's the grandaddy of all technological threats, nuclear weapons. If we keep fighting wars, it's only a matter of time before one blows up.

The highly unacceptable level of nuclear risk highlights the need to look at the choices we make around critical decisions, including cyber security. We have to take into consideration all participants' needs for our strategies to be effective....

Your battle with the government to make private communication available to the general public in the digital age has the status of folklore. But, in your recent book (co-authored with your wife Dorothie [and freely available as a PDF]), you describe a meeting of minds with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the NSA. Until I read your book, I saw the National Security Agency as bad and Diffie-Hellman as good, plain and simple. You describe how you came to see the NSA and its people as sincere actors rather than as a cynical cabal bent on repression. What changed your perspective?

Hellman: This is a great, real-life example of how taking a holistic view in a conflict, instead of just a one-sided one, resolved an apparently intractable impasse. Those insights were part of a major change in my approach to life. As we say in our book, "Get curious, not furious." These ideas are effective not just in highly visible conflicts like ours with the NSA, but in every aspect of life.
Hellman also had an interesting answer when asked if math, game theory, and software development teach any lessons applicable to issues like nuclear non-proliferation or national defense.

"The main thing to learn is that the narrative we (and other nations) tell ourselves is overly simplified and tends to make us look good and our adversaries bad."

It's not all bad

[quonset]

If we keep fighting wars, it's only a matter of time before one blows up.

If one nuclear weapon detonates, that might not be a good thing. But if several detonate that might not be so bad since that would bring on nuclear winter which would lower the planet's temperature so we don't have to worry about climate change.

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[gweihir]

Nope. Get the FUCKUNG BASICS right. Nuclear winter will not "offset" global warming. It will make things a lot worse.

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[HBI]

The current powers that be would futilely try to ban it. Performative vs. effective.

The truth is that everyone having the power to destroy the world presumes a lot of unstable people amongst the vast majority who just want to live in peace. The problem is generally unsolvable. No matter how much scrutiny you put people under, there will be someone who will escape your net. And asserting mutual assured destruction with people who are not traditionally sane is pointless.

I think you'd just have to accept th

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Security versus freedom

[quonset]

Try, The Light of Other Days [wikipedia.org] by Stephen Baxter. People become able to use mini-wormholes and watch what everyone else is doing. There is no privacy anywhere. Even worse (better?), they can use these same wormholes to go back in time and watch things unfold (no interaction). How society reacts to his, especially governments, is explored.

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[account_deleted]

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[quonset]

Somewhat similar, except in Baxter's story it is a private company which produces the device. Only later does the government get involved and set limits. However, as things progress, the public is able to use the device which sets in motion the main arc of the story.

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[myowntrueself]

I forget the name of the short story, but I read a great sci-fi short where the premise is: It becomes possible for a person to make a weapon capable of destroying the world with stuff found in the kitchen. Imagine every person having the ability to end the world. What would you trade for security versus freedom?

Reminds me of 'The Morning of the Magicians' which is a book by two French nuclear engineers about an encounter they had with an alchemist who warned them about nuclear technology saying that alchemists had known about something similar for centuries, and kept it secret since it would be possible to make something as powerful as a nuke from stuff found around a kitchen.

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[Briareos]

The Golden New Age [angryflower.com], Bob The Angry Flower?

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[gweihir]

There is not "security" or "freedom" in that scenario. What would happen instead is that some moron messes it up and detonates it or some mentally ill person detonates this intentionally.

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[account_deleted]

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Never going to stop digital spying

[Big Bipper]

You're never going to stop digital spying. Some "other bad actors" ( i.e. not our government ;-) ) will always be looking to get an advantage. The best thing about this is that our governments may be forced to stop their " cryptography bad " crap and allow the rest of us to develop and deploy the best defenses we can, even if it eventually means that our governments lose their ability to spy on us digitally.

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[gweihir]

It is not about stopping it. It is all about making it expensive enough that it can only be done in some really, really important cases. The problem with digital surveillance is that mass-surveillance is a pretty direct road to totalitarianism.

wank

[Jrabbit05]

what a load of wank the people responsible for the current multi-disaster should die in quiet in my estimations unless they have direct contributions to restoration of normalcy.

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[Jrabbit05]

just read the russia bit... deport his ass.

Too many countries sponsor APT's

[myowntrueself]

The USA and rest of 5-eyes like to constantly moan about Iran, North Korea, Russia and China having 'state sponsored APT groups' hacking around the world.
But the Western media is silent about US sponsored APT groups. Its extremely hard, in the Western world, to get any information about these APT's as they are a very closely guarded secret. But they do exist. In fact, a lot of activity that US media attributes to, eg and especially China, is quite likely US APT's running false flag operations. To claim that the USA doesn't operate an offensive cyber capability would be utterly naive.

The problem is, as Snowden demonstrated, if you hoard zero-days and other vulns, not divulging them so they can be fixed, you are part of the problem.
And now the UK wants to have a veto on Apple fixing security vulnerabilities, and to even veto disclosure of them, specifically so that they can continue to use those vulns in their own offensive cyber campaigns.

By operating offensive cyber capabilities you are hurting EVERYONE, including yourselves.

Maybe the US/UK are the pot and China is the kettle. I can't tell maybe its the other way around, THERES SO MUCH SOOT ON BOTH OF THEM!

So they reminded him of the terrible fate..

[ffkom]

... that so many previous opponents of the agencies "coincidentally" met, enough to threaten him into now praising them. What worked for Galilei probably works for Hellman, too. Objective truths, like the intentional weakening of cryptographic standards by the NSA, or the documents leaked by Snowden, will nevertheless continue to remind us that those agencies are "sincere actors" only in the sense of their sincerely evil actions.