The Cost of Cryptography

The VENONA project represents one of the most successful counter-intelligence attacks of the Cold War. It revolved around an encryption system, called the “one-time pad scheme,” that was completely unbreakable, but required generating a new, random encryption key for every message. This was hugely inconvenient, and prone to human error. And error is exactly what happened. Someone on the Soviet side (it is still not known who) began to reuse keys, allowing the decryption of about 3,000 top-secret messages by the west.

The story teaches us that security needs not just strong codes, but an easy-to-use and secure implementation. To this day, attacks rarely break the encryption algorithm (cryptographers have done their job very well!), but usually find ways to avoid it entirely instead, by discovering some unexpected weaknesses in the implementation. The modern computer security age has therefore relied on a reduction of the “cryptographic overhead”—cutting fat from the system and eliminating avenues for unexpected attacks—as much as it has been